A Walk Among the Tombstones

"And?"

"And afterward he said please please please, and she said no no no, and finally she gave him a blow-job because that was the only way to get rid of him."

"She told you this?"

"In more ladylike terms, but yeah, that's what happened. Then she brushed her teeth and called the cops."

"And reported it as rape?"

"Well, I'd be willing to call it that. It escalated from please please please to Get me off or I'll kick your teeth down your throat, so I'd say that qualifies as rape."

"Oh, sure, if it was that forceful."

"But it doesn't sound like our guys."

"No, not at all."

"I got their numbers just in case you want to follow up on them, and I told them we'd call if the producer decided to pursue it, that the whole project was kind of iffy just now. Was that right?"

"Definitely."

"So I didn't come up with anything helpful, but it's encouraging that I got three calls, don't you think?

And there'll probably be more tomorrow."

There was one call Thursday, and it had seemed promising early on. A woman in her early thirties taking graduate courses at St. John's University, abducted at knifepoint by three men as she was unlocking her parked car in one of the campus parking lots. They piled into the car with her and drove to Cunningham Park, where they had oral and vaginal sex with her, menaced her throughout with one or more knives, threatened various forms of mutilation, and did in fact cut her on one arm, although the wound may have been inflicted accidentally. When they were done with her they left her there and escaped in her car, which had still not been recovered almost seven months after the incident.

"But it can't be them," Elaine said, "because the guys were black.

The ones on Atlantic Avenue were white, weren't they?"

"Yeah, that's one thing everybody agrees on."

"Well, these men were black. I kept, you know, returning to that point, and she must have thought I was racist or something, or that I suspected her of being a racist, or I don't know what. Because why should I keep pounding away at the color of the rapists? But of course it was all-important from my point of view, because it means that she's out of the picture for our purposes. Unless sometime between now and last August they figured out how to change color."

"If they worked that out," I said, "it'd be worth a lot more than four hundred thousand to them."

"Nice. Anyway, I felt like an idiot, but I took her name and number and said we'd call her if we got a green light on the project. You want to hear something funny? She said whether it leads to anything or not she's glad she called, because it did her good to talk about it. She talked about it a lot right after it happened and she had some counseling but she hasn't talked about it lately, and it helped."

"That must have made you feel good."

"It did, because up to then I'd been feeling guilty for putting her through it under false pretenses. She said I was very easy to talk to."

"Well, that comes as no surprise to this reporter."

"She thought I was a counselor. I think she was leading up to asking if she could come in once a week for therapy. I told her I was an assistant to a producer, and that you needed pretty much the same skills."

THAT same day, I finally managed to get hold of Detective John Kelly of Brooklyn Homicide. He remembered that Leila Alvarez case and said it was a terrible thing. She'd been a pretty girl and, according to everyone who knew her, a nice kid and a serious student.

I said I was doing a piece on bodies abandoned in unusual locations, and I asked if there had been anything unusual about the condition of the body when it was found. He said there'd been some mutilation

and I asked if he could give me a little more detail and he said he thought he'd better not. Partly because they were keeping certain aspects of the case confidential, and partly to spare the feelings of the girl's family.

"I'm sure you can understand," he said.

I tried a couple of other approaches and kept running up against the same wall. I thanked him and I was going to hang up, but something made me ask him if he'd ever worked out of the Seven-eight. He asked why I wanted to know.

"Because I knew a John Kelly who did," I said, "except I don't see how you could be the same man, because he would have to be well past retirement age by now."

"That was my dad," he said. "You say your name's Scudder? What were you, a reporter?"

"No, I was on the job myself. I was at the Seven-eight for a while, and then I was at the Six in Manhattan when I made detective."

"Oh, you made detective? And now you're a writer? My dad talked about writing a book, but that's all it ever was, talk. He retired, oh, it must be eight years now, he's down in Florida growing grapefruit in his backyard. Lot of cops I know are working on a book, or say they are. Or say they're thinking about it, but you're actually doing it, huh?"

It was time to shift gears. "No," I said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"That was crap," I admitted. "I'm working private, it's what I've been doing since I left the department."

"So what do you want to know about Alvarez?"

"I want to know the nature of the mutilation."

"Why?"

"I want to know if it involved amputation."

There was a pause, long enough for me to regret the whole line of questioning. Then he said, "You know what I want to know, mister? I want to know just where the fuck you're coming from."

"There was a case in Queens a little over a year ago," I said. "Three men took a woman off Jamaica Avenue in Woodhaven and left her on a golf course in Forest Park. Along with a lot of other brutality, they cut off two of her fingers and stuck them in, uh, bodily openings."

"You got a reason to think it was the same people did both women?"

"No, but I have reason to believe that whoever did Gotteskind didn't stop at one."

"That was her name in Queens? Gotteskind?"

"Marie Gotteskind, yes. I've been trying to match her killers to other cases, and Alvarez looked possible, but all I know about it is what wound up in the papers."

"Alvarez had a finger up her ass."

"Same with Gotteskind. She also had one in front."

"In her—"

"Yeah."

"You're like me, you don't like to use the words when it's a dead person. I don't know, you hang around the MEs, they're the most irreverent bastards on earth. I guess it's to insulate themselves from feeling it."

"Probably."

"But it seems disrespectful to me. These poor people, what else can they hope for but a little respect after they're dead? They didn't get any from the person who took their life."

"No."

"She had a breast missing."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Alvarez. They cut off a breast. From the bleeding, they say she was alive when it happened."

"Dear God."

"I want to get these fucks, you know? Working Homicide you want to get everybody because there's no such thing as a little murder, but some of them get to you and this was one that got to me. We really worked it, we checked her movements, we talked to everybody who knew her, but you know how it is.

When there's no connection between the victim and the killer and not much in the way of physical evidence, you can only take it so far.

There was very little on-scene evidence because they did her somewhere else, then dumped her in the cemetery."

"That was in the paper."

"Same thing with Gotteskind?"

"Yes."

"If I'd known about Gotteskind— you say over a year ago?" I gave him the date. "So it's been sitting in a file in Queens and how am I supposed to know about it? Two corpses with fingers, uh, removed and reinserted, and here I am with my thumb up my ass, and I didn't mean to say that. Jesus."

"I hope it helps."

"You hope it helps. What else have you got?"

"Nothing."

"If you're holding out—"

"All I know about Gotteskind is what's in her file. And all I know about Alvarez is what you just told me."

"And what's your connection? Your own personal connection?"

"I just told you I—"

"No, no, no. Why the interest?"

"That's confidential."

"The hell it is. You got no right to hold out."

"I'm not."

"Well, what do you call it, then?"

I took a breath. I said, "I think I've said as much as I have to. I have no special knowledge of either homicide, Gotteskind or Alvarez. I read the one's file and you told me about the other and that's the extent of my knowledge."

"What made you read the file in the first place?"

"A newspaper story a year ago, and I called you on the basis of another newspaper story. That's it."

"You got some client you're covering for."

"If I've got a client, he's certainly not for perpetrator, and I can't see how he's anything but my own business. Wouldn't you rather compare the two cases yourself and see if that gives you a wedge into them?"

"Yeah, of course I'm gonna do that, but I wish I knew your angle."

"It's not important."

"I could tell you to come in. Or have you picked up, if you'd rather play it that way."

"You could," I agreed. "But you wouldn't get a damn thing more than I already told you. You could cost me some time, but you'd be wasting time of your own."

"You got your fucking nerve, I'll say that for you."

"Hey, come on," I said. "You've got something now that you didn't before I called. If you want to cop a resentment I suppose you can hang on to one, but what's the point?"

"What am I supposed to say, thank you?" It wouldn't hurt, I thought, but kept the thought to myself.

"The hell with it," he said. "But I think you'd better let me have your address and phone, just in case I need to get in touch with you."

The mistake had been in letting him have my name. I could find out if he was enough of a detective to look me up in the Manhattan book, but why? I gave him my address and phone and told him I was sorry I wasn't able to answer all his questions, but I had certain responsibilities to a client of mine. "That would have pissed me off when I was on the job," I said, "so I can understand why it would have the same effect on you. But I have to do what I have to do."

"Yeah, that's a line I've heard before. Well, maybe it's the same people in both cases, and maybe something'll break if we put 'em side by side. That'd be nice."

That was as close to "thank you" as we were going to get, and I was happy to settle for it. I said it would be very nice, and wished him luck. I asked to be remembered to his father.

Chapter 10

That night I went to a meeting and Elaine attended her class, and afterward we both took cabs and met at Mother Goose and listened to the music. Danny Boy turned up around eleven-thirty and joined us. He had a girl with him, very tall, very thin, very black and very strange. He introduced her as Kali. She acknowledged the introductions with a nod but didn't say a word or appear to hear anything anyone else said for a good half hour, at which point she leaned forward, stared hard at Elaine, and said, "Your aura is teal blue and very pure, very beautiful."

"Thank you," Elaine said.

"You have a very old soul," Kali said, and that was the last thing she said, and the last sign she gave that she was aware of our presence.

Danny Boy didn't have anything much to report, and we mostly just enjoyed the music, chatting about nothing important between sets. It was fairly late when we left. In the cab to her place I said, "You have a very old soul and a teal-blue aura and a cute little ass."

"She's very perceptive," Elaine said. "Most people don't notice my teal-blue aura until the second or third meeting."

"Not to mention your old soul."

"Actually, it would be a good idea not to mention my old soul. You can say what you want about my cute little ass. Where does he find them?"

"I don't know."

"If they were all stock bimbettes from Central Casting it would be one thing, but his girls don't run to type. This one, Kali— what do you figure she was on?"

"No idea."

"Because she certainly seemed to be traveling in another realm. Do people still use psychedelics? She was probably on magic mushrooms, or some hallucinogenic fungus that grows only on decaying leather.

I'll tell you one thing, she could make good money as a dominatrix."

"Not if her leather's decaying. And not unless she could keep her mind on her work."

"You know what I mean. She's got the looks for it, and the presence. Can't you see yourself groveling at her feet and loving every minute of it?"

"No."

"Well, you," she said. "The Marquis de Suave himself. Remember the time I tied you up?"

The driver was working hard at hiding his amusement. "Would you please shut up," I said.

"Remember? You fell asleep."

"That shows how safe I felt in your presence," I said. "Will you please shut up?"

"I will wrap myself in my teal-blue aura," she said, "and I will be very quiet."

BEFORE I left the following morning she told me she had a good feeling about the calls from rape victims. "Today's the day," she said.

But she turned out to be wrong, teal-blue aura or not. There were no calls at all. When I talked to her that night she was glum about it. "I guess that's it," she said. "Three Wednesday, one yesterday, and now nothing. I thought I was going to be a hero, come up with something significant."

"Ninety-eight percent of an investigation is insignificant," I said.

"You do everything you can think of because you don't know what will be useful. You must have been sensational on the phone because you got a very big response, but it's pointless to feel like a failure because you didn't turn up a living victim of the three stooges. You were looking for a needle in a haystack, and it's probably a haystack that didn't have a needle in it in the first place."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean they probably didn't leave any witnesses. They probably killed every woman they victimized, so you were probably trying to find a woman who doesn't exist."

"Well, if she doesn't exist," she said, "then I say to hell with her."

TJ WAS calling in every day, sometimes more than once a day. I had given him fifty dollars to check out the two Brooklyn phones, and he couldn't have come out very far ahead on the deal, because what he hadn't spent on subways and buses he was sinking into telephone calls.

He got a better return on his time shilling for monte dealers or assisting a street peddler or doing any of the other street chores that combined to give him an income. But he still kept pestering me for work.

Saturday I wrote out a check for my rent and paid the other monthly bills that had come in— the phone bill, my credit card. Looking at the telephone bill made me think again of the calls made to Kenan Khoury's phone. I had made another attempt a few days before to find a phone-company employee who could figure out a way to supply that data, and had been told once again that it was unobtainable.

So that was on my mind when TJ called around ten-thirty. "Give me some more phones to check out,"

he pleaded. "The Bronx, Staten Island, anywhere."

"I'll tell you what you can do for me," I said. "I'll give you a number and you tell me who called it."

"Say what?"

"Oh, nothing."

"No, you said somethin', man. Tell me what it was."

"Maybe you could do it at that," I said. "Remember how you sweet-talked the operator out of the phone number on Farragut Road?"

"You mean with my Brooks Brothers voice?"

"That's it. Maybe you could use the same voice to find some phone company vice president who can figure out how to come up with a listing of calls to a certain number in Bay Ridge." He asked a few more questions and I explained what I was looking for and why I was unable to find it.

"Hang on," he said. "You sayin' they won't give it to you?"

"They don't have it to give. They've got all the calls logged but there's no way to sort them."

"Shit," he said. "First operator I call up, she tell me ain't no way she can tell me my number. Can't believe everything they tell you, man."

"No, I—"

"You somethin'," he said. "Call you up every damn day, say what you got for TJ, an' all the time you ain't got nothin'. How come you never tell me 'bout this before? You been silly, Willie!"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean if you don't tell me what you want, how I gonna give it to you? Told you that the first time I met you, walkin' around the Deuce not sayin' nothin' to nobody. Told you right then, said, tell me what you jonesin' on, I help you find it."

"I remember."

"So why you be dickin' around with the telephone company when you could be comin' to TJ?"

"You mean you know how to get the numbers from the phone company?"

"No, man. But I know how to get the Kongs."

"THE Kongs," he said. "Jimmy and David."

"They're brothers?"

"Ain't no family resemblance far as I can see. Jimmy Hong is Chinese and David King is Jewish. Least his father is Jewish. I think his mother might be Rican."

"Why are they the Kongs?"

"Jimmy Hong and David King? Hong Kong and King Kong?"

"Oh."

"Plus their favorite game used to be Donkey Kong."

"What's that, a video game?"

He nodded. "Pretty good one."

We were at a snack bar in the bus terminal, where he'd insisted I meet him. I was drinking a cup of bad coffee and he was eating a hot dog and drinking a Pepsi. He said, "Remember that dude Socks, we was watchin' him at the arcade? He 'bout the best there is, but he ain't nothin'

next to the Kongs. You know how a player is always tryin' to keep up with the machine? Kongs didn't have to keep up with it. They was always out ahead of it."

"You brought me down here to meet a couple of pinball wizards?"

"Big difference between pinball and video games, man."

"Well, I suppose there is, but—"

"But it ain't nothin' compared to the difference between video games an' where the Kongs is at now. I told you what happens to guys hang around the arcade, how you can get so good an' then there ain't no better for you to get? So you lose interest."

"So you said."

"What some dudes get interested in is computers. What I heard, the Kongs was into computers all along, fact they used a computer to stay ahead of the video games, know what the machine was gonna do before it could do it. You play chess?"

"I know the moves."

"You an' me'll play a game sometime, see if you any good. You know those stone tables they got down by Washington Square? People bring their time clocks, study chess books while they waitin' to play? I play there sometimes."

"You must be good."

He shook his head. "Some of those dudes," he said, "you play against them, it's like you tryin' to run a footrace standin' in water up to your waist. You can't get nowhere, 'cause they always five, six moves ahead of you in their mind."

"Sometimes it feels like that in my line of work."

"Yeah? Well, that's how video games got for the Kongs, they was five or six moves out in front. So they into computers, they what you call hackers. You know what that is?"

"I've heard the term."

"Man, you want something from the phone company, you don't call no operator. Don't mess with no vice president, either. You call the Kongs. They get in the phones and crawl around in there, like the phone company's a monster and they swimmin' in its bloodstream. You know that picture, whatchacallit, Fantastic Voyage? They take a voyage in the phones."

"I don't know," I said. "If an executive at the company can't figure out how to extract that data—"

"Man, ain't you listenin'?" He sighed, then sucked hard on his straw and drained the last of his Pepsi.

"You want to know what's happenin' on the streets, what's goin'

down on the Deuce or in the Barrio or in Harlem, who do you go and ask? The fuckin' mayor?"

"Oh," I said.

"You see what I sayin'? They hangin' out on the streets of the phone company. You know Ma Bell? The Kongs be lookin' up her skirt."

"Where are we going to find them? The arcade?"

"Told you. They lost interest some time ago. They come by once in a while just to see what's shakin', but they don't hang out there no more.

We ain't gonna find them. They gonna find us. I told 'em we'd be here."

"How did you reach them?"

"How you think? Beeped 'em. Kongs ain't never too far from a phone. You know, that hot dog was good. You wouldn't think you'd get anything decent, place like this, but they give you a good hot dog."

"Does that mean you want another?"

"Might as well. Take 'em some time to get here, and then they want to look you over before they come an' meet you. Want to satisfy themselves that you alone and that they can split in a hot second if they scared of you."

"Why would they be scared of me?"

" 'Cause you might be some kind of cop workin' for the phone company. Man, the Kongs is outlaws!

Ma Bell ever gets her hands on them, she gone whip their ass."

"THE thing is," Jimmy Hong said, "we have to be careful. People in suits are convinced that hackers are the biggest threat to corporate America since the Yellow Peril. The media is always running stories about what hackers could do to the system if we wanted to."

"Destroying data," David King said. "Altering records. Wiping out circuitry."

"It makes a good story, but they lose sight of the fact that we never pull that shit. They think we're going to put dynamite on the railroad tracks when all we're doing is hitching a free ride."

"Oh, every once in a while some nitwit introduces a virus—"

"But most of that isn't hackers, it's some jerk with a grudge against a company or somebody introducing a glitch into the system by using bootleg software."

"The point is," David said, "Jimmy's too old to take chances."

"Turned eighteen last month," Jimmy Hong said.

"So if they catch us he'll be tried as an adult. That's if they go by chronological age, but if they take emotional maturity into account—"

"Then David would go scot-free," Jimmy said, "because he hasn't reached the age of reason."

"Which came between the Stone Age and the Iron Age."

Once they decided they trusted you, you couldn't get them to shut up. Jimmy Hong was around six-two, long and lean, with straight black hair and a long, saturnine face. He wore aviator sunglasses with amber lenses, and after we'd been sitting together for ten or fifteen minutes he changed them for a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with round untinted lenses, altering his appearance from hip to studious.

David King was no more than five-seven, with a round face and red hair and a lot of freckles. Both of them wore Mets warmup jackets and chinos and Reeboks, but the similarity of dress wasn't enough to make them look like twins.

If you closed your eyes, though, you might have been fooled. Their voices were close and their speech patterns were very similar and they finished each other's sentences a lot.

They liked the idea of playing a role in a murder case— I hadn't gone into a great deal of detail— and they were amused at the response I'd received from various functionaries at the telephone company.

"That's beautiful," Jimmy Hong said. "Saying it can't be done.

Meaning most likely that he couldn't figure out how to do it."

"It's their system," David King said, "and you'd think they would at least understand it."

"But they don't."

"And they hate us, because we understand it better than they do."

"And they think we'd hurt the system—"

"— when actually we happen to love the system. Because if you're going to do any serious hacking, NYNEX is where it's at."

"It's a beautiful system."

"Unbelievably complex."

"Wheels within wheels."

"Labyrinths within labyrinths."

"The ultimate video game, and the ultimate Dungeons and Dragons, all rolled into one."

"Cosmic."

I said. "But it can be done?"

"What can? Oh, the numbers. Phone calls placed on a specific day to a specific number?"

"Right."

"Be a problem," David King said.

"An interesting problem, he means."

"Right, very interesting. A problem with a solution for sure, a solvable problem."

"But a tricky one."

"Because of the amount of data."

"Tons of data," Jimmy Hong said. "Millions and millions of pieces of data."

"By data he means phone calls."

"Billions of phone calls. Untold billions of phone calls."

"Which you have to process."

"But before you even start to do that—"

"You have to get in."

"Which used to be easy."

"Used to be a cinch."

"They would leave the door open."

"Now they close it."

"Nail it shut, you could say."

I said, "If you need to buy special equipment—"

"Oh, no. Not really."

"We already got everything we need."

"Doesn't take much. Halfway decent laptop, a modem, an acoustic coupler—"

"Whole package won't run more than twelve hundred dollars."

"Unless you went crazy and bought a high-priced laptop, but you don't have to."

"The one we use cost seven-fifty, and it's got everything you need."

"So you could do it?"

They exchanged glances, then looked at me. Jimmy Hong said,

"Sure, we could do it."

"Be interesting, actually."

"Have to pull an all-nighter."

"Can't be tonight, either."

"No, tonight's out. How soon would it have to be?"

"Well—"

"Tomorrow's Sunday. Sunday night all right with you, Matt?"

"It's fine with me."

"You, Mr. King?"

"Works for me, Mr. Hong."

"TJ? You figuring to be there?"

"Tomorrow night?" It was the first he'd said anything since introducing me to the Kongs. "Lessee, tomorrow night. What did I have planned for tomorrow night? Was that the press reception at Gracie Mansion or was I supposed to have dinner with Henry Kissinger at Windows on the World?" He mimed paging through a date book, then looked up bright-eyed. "What do you know? I be free."

Jimmy Hong said, "There'll be some expenses, Matt. We'll need a hotel room."

"I have a room."

"You mean where you live?" They grinned at each other, amused at my naïveté. "No, what you want is someplace anonymous. See, we're going to be deep inside NYNEX—"

"Crawling around inside the belly of the beast, you could say—"

"— and we might leave footprints."

"Or fingerprints, if you prefer."

"Even voiceprints, speaking metaphorically, of course."

"So you don't want to do this from a phone that could be traced to anybody. What you want to do is rent a hotel room under a false name and pay cash for it."

"A reasonably decent one."

"It doesn't have to be ritzy."

"Just so it has direct-dial phones."

"Which most of them do nowadays. And push-button, it should be push-button."

"Not the old rotary dial."

"Well, that's easy enough," I said. "Is that what you usually do?

Rent a hotel room?"

They exchanged glances again.

"Because if there's a hotel you prefer—"

David said, "The thing is, Matt, when we want to hack we don't generally have a hundred or a hundred and fifty bucks to spend on a decent hotel room."

"Or even seventy-five dollars for a crummy hotel room."

"Or fifty for a disgusting hotel room. So what we'll do—"

"We find a bank of pay phones where there's not much traffic, like in the Grand Central waiting room over by the commuter lines—"

"— because there's not many commuter trains leaving in the middle of the night—"

"— or in an office building, anything like that."

"Or one time we sort of let ourselves into an office—"

"Which was stupid, man, and I never want to do that again."

"We just did it to use the phone."

"And can you feature telling that to the cops? 'It's not burglary, Officer, we just dropped in to use the phones.' "

"Well, it was exciting, but we wouldn't do it again. The thing is, see, we'll probably have to spend hours and hours on this—"

"And you wouldn't want anybody walking in, or having to switch phones when we're all hooked up."

"No problem," I said. "We'll get a decent hotel room. What else?"

"Coke."

"Or Pepsi."

"Coke's better."

"Or Jolt. 'All the sugar and twice the caffeine.' "

"Maybe some junk food. Maybe some Doritos."

"Get the ranch flavor, not the barbecue."

"Potato chips, Cheez Doodles—"

"Oh, man, not Cheez Doodles!"

"I like Cheez Doodles."

"Man, that has got to be the lamest junk food there is. I challenge you to name anything edible that is stupider than Cheez Doodles."

"Pringles."

"No fair! Pringles aren't food. Matt, you got to judge this one.

What do you say? Are Pringles food?"

"Well—"

"They're not! Hong, you are so sick. Pringles are tiny Frisbees that warped, that's all they are. They're not food."

WHEN Kenan Khoury didn't answer I tried his brother. Peter's voice was thick with sleep and I apologized for waking him. "I keep doing that," I said. "Sorry."

"My own fault, nodding out in the middle of the afternoon. My sleep schedule got all turned around lately. What's up?"

"Not much. I was trying to reach Kenan."

"Still in Europe. He called me last night."

"Oh."

"Coming back Monday. Why, you got some good news to report?"

"Not yet. I've got some cabs I have to take."

"Huh?"

"Expenses," I said. "I'll have to shell out close to two thousand dollars tomorrow. I wanted to clear it with him."

"Hey, no problem. I'm sure he'll say yes. He said he'd cover your expenses, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"So lay it out. He'll pay you back."

"That's the problem," I said. "My money's in the bank and it's Saturday."

"Can't you use an ATM?"

"Not for a safe-deposit box. I can't get it all out of my checking account because I just paid the bills the other day."

"So write a check and cover it Monday."

"This isn't the kind of expense where the people will take a check."

"Oh, right." There was a pause. "I don't know what to tell you, Matt. I could come up with a couple of hundred, but I haven't got anything like two grand."

"Doesn't Kenan have it in the safe?"

"Probably a lot more than that, but I can't get in there. You don't give a junkie the combination to your safe, not even if he's your brother.

Not unless you're crazy."

I didn't say anything.

"I'm not bitter," he said. "I'm just stating a fact. No reason on earth for me to have the combination to the safe. I got to tell you, I'm glad I don't have it. I wouldn't trust myself with it."

"You're clean and sober now, Pete. What's it been, a year and a half?"

"I'm still a drunk and a junkie, man. You know the difference between the two? A drunk will steal your wallet."

"And a junkie?"

"Oh, a junkie'll steal your wallet, too. And then he'll help you look for it."

I ALMOST asked Pete if he wanted to go to that Chelsea meeting again, but something made me let the moment pass. Maybe I remembered that I wasn't his sponsor, and that it was not a position for which I wanted to volunteer.

I called Elaine and asked her how she was fixed for cash. "Come on over," she said. "I've got a house full of money."

She had fifteen hundred in fifties and hundreds and said she could get more from the ATM, but no more than $500 a day. I took twelve hundred so I wouldn't leave her broke. That, added to what I had in my wallet and what I could get from my own ATM, would be plenty.

I told her what I needed the money for and she thought the whole thing was fascinating. "But is it safe?"

she wanted to know. "It's obviously illegal, but how illegal is it?"

"It's worse than jaywalking. Computer trespass is a felony, and so is computer tampering, and I have a feeling the Kongs will be committing both of them tomorrow night. I'll be aiding and abetting them, and I've already committed criminal solicitation. I'll tell you, you can't turn around these days without trampling all over the penal law."

"But you think it's worth it?"

"I think so."

"Because they're just kids. You wouldn't want to get them in trouble."

"I wouldn't want to get myself in trouble, either. And they run this particular risk all the time. At least they're getting paid for it."

"How much are you going to give them?"

"Five hundred apiece."

She whistled. "That's not bad for a night's work."

"No, it's not, and if they'd come up with a figure it would probably have been a lot less. They went blank when I asked them how much they wanted, so I suggested five hundred each. That seemed fine to them.

They're middle-class kids, I don't think they're hurting for money. I have a feeling I could have talked them into doing the job for free."

"By appealing to their better nature."

"And their desire to be in on something exciting. But I didn't want to do that. Why shouldn't they have

the dough? I'd have been willing to pay more than that to some phone-company employee if I could have figured out who to bribe. But I couldn't find anybody who'd admit what I wanted was technologically possible. Why not give it to the Kongs? It's not my money, and Kenan Khoury says you can always afford to be generous."

"And if he decides to bail out?"

"That doesn't seem likely."

"Unless, of course, he gets arrested going through customs wearing a vest full of powder."

"I guess something like that could happen," I said, "but that would just mean I'd be out of pocket to the tune of a little under two grand, and I started out by taking ten thousand dollars from him a couple of weeks ago. That's almost how long it's been. It'll be two weeks Monday."

"What's the matter?"

"Well, I haven't accomplished very much in that amount of time. It seems as though— well, the hell with it, I'm doing what I can. Anyway, the point is that I can afford to take the chance that I won't get reimbursed."

"I suppose so." She frowned. "How do you get two thousand dollars? Say one-fifty for a hotel room, and a thousand for the two Kongs. How much Coca-Cola can two kids drink?"

"I drink Coke, too. And don't forget TJ."

"He drinks a lot of Coke?"

"All he wants. And he gets five hundred dollars."

"For introducing you to the Kongs. I didn't even think of that."

"For introducing me to the Kongs, and for thinking of introducing me to the Kongs. They're the perfect way to spirit information out of the phone company, and I never would have thought of looking for someone like that."

"Well, you hear about computer hackers," she said, "but how would you find one? They don't list them in the Yellow Pages. Matt, how old is TJ?"

"I don't know."

"You never asked him?"

"I never got a straight answer. I'd say fifteen or sixteen, and I don't think I could be off by more than a year either way."

"And he lives on the street? Where does he sleep?"

"He says he's got a place. He's never said where or with whom.

One thing you learn on the street, you don't want to be too quick to tell your business to people."

"Or even your name. Does he know how much he's getting?"

I shook my head. "We haven't discussed it."

"He won't be expecting that much, will he?"

"No, but why shouldn't he have it?"

"I'm not disagreeing with you. I just wonder what he's going to do with five hundred dollars."

"Whatever he wants. At a quarter a shot, he could call me up two thousand times."

"I guess," she said. "God, when I think of the different people we know. Danny Boy, Kali. Mick. TJ, the Kongs. Matt? Let's not ever leave New York, okay?"

Chapter 11

On Sundays Jim Faber and I usually have our weekly dinner at a Chinese restaurant, although we occasionally go somewhere else. I met him at six-thirty at our regular place, and a few minutes after seven he asked me if I had a train to catch. "Because that's the third time in the past fifteen minutes you looked at your watch."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't realize it."

"You anxious about something?"

"Well, there's something I have to do later," I said, "but there's plenty of time. I don't have to be anywhere until eight-thirty."

"I'll be going to a meeting myself at eight-thirty, but I don't suppose that's what you've got scheduled."

"No. I went to one this afternoon because I knew I wouldn't be able to fit one in tonight."

"This appointment of yours," he said. "You're not nervous because you're gonna be around booze, are

you?"

"God, no. There won't be anything stronger than Coca-Cola.

Unless somebody picks up some Jolt."

"Is that a new drug I don't know about?"

"It's a cola drink. Like Coke, but twice as much caffeine."

"I don't know if you can handle it."

"I don't know that I'm going to try. You want to know where I'm going after I leave here? I'm going to check into a hotel under a phony name and then I'm going to have three teenage boys up to my room."

"Don't tell me any more."

"I won't, because I wouldn't want you to have foreknowledge of a felony."

"You're planning on committing a felony with these kids?"

"They're the ones who'll be committing a felony. I'm just going to watch."

"Have some more of the sea bass," he said. "It's especially good tonight."

BY nine o'clock all four of us were assembled in a $160-a-night corner room in the Frontenac, a 1,200-room hotel built a few years ago with Japanese money and since sold to a Dutch conglomerate.

The hotel was on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-third Street, and from our room on the twenty-eighth floor you could get a glimpse of the Hudson. Or you could have, if we hadn't drawn the shades.

There was a spread of snack food laid out on the top of the dresser, including Cheez Doodles but not including Pringles. The little refrigerator held three varieties of cola, a six-pack of each. The telephone had been relocated from the bedside table to the desk, with something called an acoustic coupler attached to its earpiece and something else called a modem plugged into its rear. It shared the desk with the Kongs' laptop computer.

I had signed the register as John J. Gunderman and gave an address on Hillcrest Avenue, in Skokie, Illinois. I paid cash, along with the fifty-dollar deposit required of cash customers who wanted access to the telephone and mini-bar. I didn't care about the mini-bar, but we damn well needed the phone. That was why we were in the room.

Jimmy Hong was seated at the desk, his fingers flashing on the computer's keyboard, then punching numbers on the phone. David King had drawn up another chair but was standing, looking over Jimmy's shoulder at the computer screen. Earlier he had tried to explain to me how the modem allowed the computer to hook into other computers through the telephone lines, but it was a little like trying to explain the fundamentals of non-Euclidean geometry to a field mouse. Even when I understood the words he used, I still didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

The Kongs had worn suits and ties, but only to get through the hotel lobby; their ties and jackets were on the bed now, and they had their sleeves rolled up. TJ was in his usual costume, but they hadn't hassled him at the desk. He'd come lugging two sacks of groceries, disguised as a delivery boy.

Jimmy said, "We're in."

"All right!"

"Well, we're into NYNEX but that's like being inside the hotel lobby when you need to be in a room on the fortieth floor. Okay, let's try something."

His fingers danced and combinations of numbers and letters popped up on the screen. After a while he said, "Bastards keep changing the password. You know the amount of effort they spend just trying to keep people like us out?"

"As if they could."

"If they put the same energy into improving the system—"

"Stupid."

More letters, more numbers. "Damn," Jimmy said, and reached for his can of Coke. "You know what?"

"Time for our people-to-people program," David said.

"That's what I was thinking. You feel like refining your human-contact skills?"

David nodded and took the phone. "Some people call this 'social engineering,' " he told me. "It's hardest with NYNEX because they warn their people about us. Good thing for us that most of the people who work there are morons." He dialed a telephone number, and after a moment he said, "Hi, this is Ralph Wilkes, I'm trouble-shooting your line. You've been having trouble getting into COSMOS, right?"

"They always do," Jimmy Hong murmured. "So it's a safe question."

"Yeah, right," David was saying. There was a lot of jargon I couldn't follow, and then he said, "Now how do you log in? What's your access code? No, right, don't tell me, you're not supposed to tell me, it's security." He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I know, they give us grief about the same thing. Look, don't tell me the code, just punch it in on your keyboard." Numbers and letters appeared on our screen and Jimmy's fingers were quick to enter them on our keyboard. "Fine," David said.

"Now can you do the same thing with your password for COSMOS?

Don't tell me what it is, just enter it. Uh-huh."

"Beautiful," Jimmy said softly as the number came up on our screen. He punched it in.

"That ought to do it," David told whoever he was talking to. "I don't think you should have any problems from here on in." He broke the connection and let out a huge sigh. "I don't think we should have any problems, either. 'Don't tell me the number, just enter it. Don't tell me, darling, just tell my computer.' "

"Hot damn," Jimmy said.

"We're in?"

"We're in."

"Yay!"

"Matt, what's your phone number?"

"Don't call me," I said. "I'm not home."

"I don't want to call you. I want to check your line. What's the number? Never mind, don't tell me, see if I care. 'Scudder, Matthew.'

West Fifty-seventh Street, right? That look familiar?"

I looked at the screen. "That's my phone number," I said.

"Uh-huh. You happy with it? You want me to change it, give you something easier to remember?"

"If you call the phone company to get your number changed,"

David said, "it takes them a week or so to run it through channels. But we can do it on the spot."

"I think I'll keep the number I've got," I said.

"Suit yourself. Uh-huh. You've got pretty basic service, haven't you? No Call Forwarding, no Call Waiting. You're at a hotel, you've got the switchboard backing you up, so maybe you don't need Call Waiting, but you ought to have Call Forwarding anyhow. Suppose you stay over at somebody's house?

You could get your calls routed there automatically."

"I don't know if I'd use it enough to make it worthwhile."

"Doesn't cost anything."

"I thought there was a monthly charge for it."

He grinned and his fingers were busy on the keypad. "No charge for you," he said, "because you have influential friends. As of this moment you've got Call Forwarding, compliments of the Kongs. We're in COSMOS now, that's the particular system we invaded, so that's where I'm entering changes in your account. The system that figures your billing won't know about the change, so it won't cost you anything."

"Whatever you say."

"I see you use AT&T for your long-distance calls. You didn't select Sprint or MCI."

"No, I didn't figure I would save that much."

"Well, I'm giving you Sprint," he said. "It's going to save you a fortune."

"Really?"

"Uh-huh, because NYNEX is going to route your long-distance calls to Sprint, but Sprint's not going to know about it."

"So you won't get billed," David said.

"I don't know," I said.

"Trust me."

"Oh, I don't doubt what you said. I just don't know how I feel about it. It's theft of services."

Jimmy looked at me. "We're talking about the phone company," he said.

"I realize that."

"You think they're gonna miss it?"

"No, but—"

"Matt, when you make a call from a pay phone and the call goes through but the quarter comes back anyway, what do you do? Keep it or put it back in the slot?"

"Or send it to them in stamps," David suggested.

"I see your point," I said.

"Because we all know what happens when the phone eats your quarter and doesn't put the call through.

Face it, none of us are way out in front of the game when we're dealing with Mother Bell."

"I suppose."

"So you've got free long distance and free Call Forwarding. There's a code you have to enter to forward your calls, but just ring them up and tell them you lost the slip and they'll explain it to you. Nothing to it.

TJ, what's your phone number?"

"Ain't got one."

"Well, your favorite pay phone."

"Favorite? I don't know. Don't know the number of any of 'em, anyhow."

"Well, pick one out and give me the location."

"There be a bank of three of 'em in Port Authority that I use some."

"No good. Too many phones there, it's impossible to know if we're talking about the same one. How about one on a street corner?"

He shrugged. "Say Eighth and Forty-third."

"Uptown, downtown?"

"Uptown, east side of the street."

"Okay, let's just… there, got it. You want to write down the number?"

"Just change it," David suggested.

"Good idea. Make it an easy one to remember. How about TJ-5-4321?"

"Like it's my own phone number? Hey, I like that!"

"Let's just see if it's available. Nope, somebody's got it. So why don't we take the other direction?

TJ-5-6789. No problem, so let's make it all yours. So ordered."

"You can just do that?" I wondered. "Aren't different three-number prefixes specifically linked to different areas?"

"Used to be. And there's still exchanges, but that works for the particular line number, and that has nothing to do with what you dial.

See, the number you dial, like the one I just gave TJ, is the same as the PIN code you use to get money out of your ATM at the bank. It's just a recognition code, really."

"Well, it's an access code," David said. "But it accesses the line, and that's what routes the call."

"Let's fix the phone for you, TJ. It's a pay phone, right?"

"Right."

"Wrong. It was a pay phone. Now it's a free phone."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that. Some idiot'll probably report it in a week or two, but until then you can save yourself a few quarters. Remember when we played Robin Hood?"

"Oh, that was fun," David said. "We were down at the World Trade Center one night making calls from

a pay phone, and of course the first thing we did was convert it, make it free—"

"— or otherwise we'd be dropping quarters in all night long, which is pretty ridiculous—"

"— and Hong here says pay phones should be free for everybody, same as the subways ought to be free, they ought to eliminate the turnstiles—"

"— or make them turn with or without a token, which you could do if they were computerized, but they're mechanical—"

"— which is pretty primitive, when you stop and think about it—"

"— but with pay phones we're in a position to do something, so for I think it was two hours—"

"— more like an hour and a half—"

"— we're hopping through COSMOS, or maybe it was MIZAR—"

"— no, it was COSMOS—"

"— and we're changing one pay phone after another, liberating it, setting it free—"

"— and Hong's really getting into it, like 'Power to the People' and everything—"

"— and I don't know how many phones we switched by the time we were done." He looked up. "You know something? Sometimes I can see why NYNEX wants to nail our hides to the wall. If you look at it in a certain way, we're sort of a major pain in the ass to them."

"So?"

"So you've got to see their point of view, that's all."

"No you don't," David King said. "The last thing you have to do is see their point of view. That's about as smart as playing PacMan and feeling sorry for the blue meanies."

Jimmy Hong argued the point, and while they kicked it back and forth I cracked a fresh Coke. When I got back where the action was Jimmy said, "All right, we're in the Brooklyn circuits. Give me that number again."

I looked it up and read it off and he fed it to the computer. More letters and numbers, meaningless to me, appeared on the screen. His fingers danced on the keys, and my client's name and address showed up.

"That your friend?" Jimmy wanted to know. I said it was. "He's not talking on the phone," he said.

"You can tell that?"

"Sure. We could listen in if he was. You can just drop in and listen to anybody."

"Except it's so boring."

"Yeah, we used to do it sometimes. You think maybe you'll hear something hot, or people talking about a crime or spy stuff. But all you really get to hear is this remarkably tedious crap. 'Pick up a quart of milk on your way home, darling.' Really boring."

"And so many people are so inarticulate. They just stutter and stammer along and you want to tell 'em to spit it out or forget about it."

"Of course there's always phone sex."

"Don't remind me."

"That's King's favorite. Three dollars a minute billed to your home phone, but if you've got a pay phone that you taught not to be a pay phone, then it's free."

"It feels creepy, though. What we did once, though, we just dropped in and listened on some of those lines."

"And then cut in and made comments, which really freaked this one guy. He was paying to talk one-on-one to this woman with this incredible voice—"

"— who probably had a face like Godzilla, but nobody could tell—"

"— and here's King dropping in on him in the middle of a sentence and trashing his fantasy."

"The girl was freaking, too."

"Girl, she was probably a grandmother."

"She's going like, 'Who said that? Where are you? How did you get on this line?' "

Throughout this exchange Jimmy Hong had been participating in another dialogue as well, this one with the computer. Now he held up a hand for silence and hit keys with the other. "Okay," he said. "Gimme the date. It was in March, right?"

"The twenty-eighth."

"Month three, date two-eight. And we want calls to 04-053-904."

"No, his number is—"

"That's his line number, Matt. Remember the difference? Uh, what I figured. Data not available."

"What does that mean?"

"Means we were smart to bring in a lot of food. Could somebody bring me some of those Doritos?

We're going to be here awhile, that's all. You interested in calls he made from his phone, while we're in this part of the system? Seems a shame to waste it."

"Might as well."

"See what we get. Look at that, it doesn't want to tell me a thing.

Okay, let's try this. Uh-huh. Okay, now—"

Then the system began spitting out a record of calls, reeling them off chronologically starting a few minutes after midnight. There were two calls before one in the morning, then nothing until 8:47, when the system logged a thirty-second call to a 212 number. There was one other call in the morning and several in the early afternoon, and none at all between 2:51 and 5:18, when he had been on the phone for a minute and a half with his brother. I recognized Peter Khoury's number.

Then nothing else that night.

"Anything you want to copy, Matt?"

"No."

"Okay," he said. "Now for the hard part."

I COULDN'T tell you what it was that they did. A little after eleven they switched and David took over the controls, while Jimmy paced the floor and yawned and stretched and went to the bathroom and came back and polished off a package of Hostess cupcakes. At twelve-thirty they switched again and David went into the bathroom and took a shower. By this time TJ was sound asleep on the bed, lying fully clothed on the bedspread, shoes and all, and clutching one of the pillows as if the world were trying to get it away from him.

At one-thirty Jimmy said, "God damn it, I can't believe there's no way into NPSN."

"Give me the phone," David said. He dialed a number, snarled, broke the connection, dialed again, and on the third try got through to somebody. "Yo," he said. "Who'm I talkin' to? Great. Listen, Rita, this is Taylor Fielding at NICNAC Central an' I got a Code Five emergency coming down. I need your NPSN

access code and your password before the whole thing backs up clear to Cleveland. That's Code Five, did you hear me?" He listened intently, then reached out a hand for the computer keyboard. "Rita," he said, "you're beautiful. You saved my life, no joke. Can you believe I had two people in a row didn't know a Code Five takes precedence?

Yeah, well, that's 'cause you pay attention. Listen, if you get any static on this, I'll take full responsibility. Yeah, you too. 'Bye."

"You take full responsibility," Jimmy said. "I like that."

"Well, it seemed only right."

"What the hell is a Code Five, will you tell me that?"

"I don't know. What's NICNAC Central? Who's Taylor Feldman?"

"You said Fielding."

"Well, it was Feldman before he changed it. I don't know, man. I just made it all up but it sure impressed Rita."

"You sounded so desperate."

"Well, why shouldn't I be? Half-past one in the morning and we're not even into NPSN yet."

"We are now."

"And how sweet it is. I'll tell you, Hong, you can't beat that Code Five. It really cuts through all the bureaucratic bullshit, you know what I mean. 'I got a Code Five emergency coming down.' Man, that just about blew her doors off."

" 'Rita, you're beautiful.' "

"Man, I was falling in love, I have to say it. And by the time we were through we'd sort of established a relationship, you know?"

"You gonna call her again?"

"I bet I can get a password off her anytime, unless something tips her that she just gave away the store.

Otherwise next time I call her we're gonna be old friends."

"Call her sometime," I said, "and don't try to get a password or an access code or anything else."

"You mean just ring her up to chat?"

"That's the idea. Maybe give her some information, but don't try to get anything out of her."

"Far out," David said.

"And then later on—"

"Got it," Jimmy said. "Matt, I don't know if you've got either the digital dexterity or the hand-eye coordination, and you don't really know a thing about the technology, but I have to tell you something.

You've got the heart and soul of a hacker."

ACCORDING to the Kongs, the whole process really got interesting after they got into NPSN, whatever that meant. "This is the part that's fascinating from a technical standpoint," David explained,

"because here's where we try retrieving information the NYNEX

people claimed wasn't available. They'll say that just to brush you off, but some of them were telling the truth, or what they thought was the truth, because the fact of the matter is they wouldn't know how to go about finding it. So it's almost as though we have to invent our own program and feed it into their system so it'll spit out the data we want."

"But," Jimmy said, "if you're not into the technical side of it, there's really nothing there to keep you on the edge of your chair."

TJ, awake now, was standing behind David's chair and watching the computer screen as if hypnotized.

Jimmy went over to the refrigerator for a can of Jolt. I dropped into the one easy chair, and David was right, there was nothing to keep me on the edge of it. I sank back into the cushions, and the next thing I knew TJ was shaking me gently by the shoulder, saying my name.

I opened my eyes. "I must have been sleeping."

"Yeah, you sleepin', all right. You was snorin' some earlier."

"What time is it?"

"Almost four. The calls is comin' up now."

"Can they just get a printout?"

TJ turned and relayed the request, and the Kongs started giggling.

David got control of himself and reminded me that we didn't have a printer with us. My sponsor was a printer, I almost said. Instead I said,

"No, of course not. I'm sorry, I'm still half-asleep."

"Stay where you are. We'll copy it all down for you."

"I'll get you some Jolt," TJ offered. I told him not to bother but he brought me a can of it anyway. I took a sip of it but it really wasn't what I wanted, nor was I entirely certain what I did want. I got to my feet and tried to stretch some of the stiffness out of my back and shoulders, then walked over to the desk where David King was working the computer while Jimmy Hong copied down the information on the screen.

"There they are," I said.

They were coming right up on the screen, starting with the first call at 3:38 to tell Kenan Khoury his wife was missing. Then three calls at roughly twenty-minute intervals, the last one logged at 4:54. Kenan had called his brother at 5:18, and the next call he'd received came in at 6:04, which must have been just before Peter got to the Colonial Road house.

Then there was a sixth call at 8:01. That would have been the one ordering them to Farragut Road, where they received the call that sent them chasing out to Veterans Avenue. And then they'd come home, having been assured that Francine would be delivered there, and then they waited in an empty house until 10:04, when the last call came, the one that sent them around the corner to the Ford Tempo with the parcels in its trunk.

"Wow," David was saying. "This has been, like, the most amazing education. Because we had to keep at it, you know? There was data you needed, so we couldn't quit. When you're just hacking you can only take so much boredom before you go and do something else, but we had to stay with it until we crashed through the boredom and got to what was on the other side of it."

"Which was more boredom," Jimmy said.

"But you learn a lot, you really do. If we had to do this same operation again—"

"God forbid."

"Yeah, but if we did, we could do it in half the time. Less, because the whole speed-search option gets double-timed when you cut back into the—"

What he said after that was even less comprehensible to me, and I'd stopped listening anyway because Jimmy Hong was handing me a sheet of all calls into the Khoury house on the twenty-eighth of March.

"I should have told you," I said. "The early ones don't matter, just the seven starting at three-thirty-eight." I studied the list. He'd copied everything: time of the call, the line number of the caller, the phone number you'd dial in order to reach that phone, and the duration of the call. That, too, was more than I needed, but there was no reason to tell him that.

"Seven calls, each from a different phone," I said. "No, I'm wrong.

They used one phone twice, for calls two and seven."

"Is it what you wanted?"

I nodded. "How much it gives me is something else again. It could be a lot or a little. I won't know until I get hold of a reverse directory and find out who those phones belong to."

They stared at me. I still didn't get it until Jimmy Hong took off his glasses and blinked at me. "A reverse directory? You've got the two of us here, with everything buried in the deep inner recesses of NPSN, and you think you need a reverse directory?"

"Because we're talking child's play here," David King said. He sat down at the keyboard again. "Okay,"

he said. "Give me the first number."

THEY were all pay phones.

I'd been afraid of that. They had been professionally cautious throughout, and there was no reason to suppose that they wouldn't have taken care to use phones that couldn't be linked to them.

But a different pay phone each time? That was harder to figure, but one of the Kongs came up with a theory that made sense. They were guarding against the possibility that Kenan Khoury had alerted someone who was in a position to tap in on the line and identify the phone at the other end. By keeping the calls short they could be sure of being away from the scene before anyone who traced the call could get there; by never returning to the same phone, they were covered even if Khoury had the call traced and the telephone staked out.

"Because tracing a call is instantaneous now," Jimmy told me.

"You don't really trace it, not if you're hooked into it with a setup like this. You just look on the screen and read it off."

Why the lapse in security on the last call? By then they'd obviously known there was no need for it.

Khoury had done everything the way he was supposed to, had made no attempt to interfere with the ransom pickup, and was no longer worth such elaborate precautions. That was the time they could have felt safe enough to use a phone in their own house or apartment, and if only they'd done so I would have had the bastards. If it had started raining, if there'd been some compelling reason to stay inside. If nobody had wanted to leave the other two with the ransom money.

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.

Chapter 12

I stopped 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."

He asked what it came to and I told him. "No problem," he said.

"What did you do, front the expense money yourself? You shoulda asked Pete for it."

"I didn't mind fronting it. I did ask your brother, as a matter of fact, because I couldn't get to my own cash over the weekend. But he didn't have it either."

"No?"

"But he said to go ahead, that you wouldn't want me to wait."

"Well, he was right about that. When'd you talk to him? I called him the minute I walked in the door but there was no answer."

"Saturday," I said. "Saturday afternoon."

"I tried him before I got on the plane, wanted him to meet my flight, save me from the Ghanaian Flash.

Couldn't get him. What did you do, stall those guys on the cash?"

"I got a friend to lend me enough to cover."

"Well, you want to pick up your dough? I'm beat, I've been on more planes in the past week than Whatsisname, just got back from the Middle East himself. The secretary of state."

"He was just on television."

"We were in and out of some of the same airports, but I can't say we crossed paths. I wonder what he does with his Frequent Flyer miles. I ought to be eligible for a free trip to the moon by now. You want to come over? I'm wiped out and jet-lagged but I'm not gonna be able to sleep now anyway."

"I think I could," I said. "In fact I think I'd better. I'm not used to pulling all-nighters, as my partners in crime called it. They took it in stride, but they're a few years younger than I am."

"Age makes a difference. I never used to believe there was such a thing as jet lag, and now I could be the poster boy if they got up a national campaign against it. I think I'll try to get some sleep myself, maybe take a pill to help me get under. Sunset Park, huh? I'm trying to think who I know there."

"I don't think it's going to be anyone you know."

"You don't, huh?"

"They've done this before," I said. "But strictly as amateurs. I know a few things about them I didn't know a week ago."

"We getting close, Matt?"

"I don't know how close we're getting," I said. "But we're getting somewhere."

* * *

I CALLED downstairs and told Jacob I was taking my phone off the hook. "I don't want to be disturbed," I said. "Tell anybody who calls that they can reach me after five."

I set the clock for that hour and got in bed. I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the map of Brooklyn, but before I could even begin to focus in on Sunset Park I was gone.

Traffic noises roused me slightly at one point, and I told myself I could open my eyes and check the clock, but instead I drifted off into a complicated dream involving clocks and computers and telephones, the source of which was not terribly difficult to guess. We were in a hotel room and someone was banging on the door. In the dream I went to the door and opened it. Nobody was there, but the noise continued, and then I was out of the dream and awake and somebody was pounding on my door.

It was Jacob, saying that Miss Mardell was on the phone and said it was urgent. "I know you wanted to sleep till five," he said, "and I told her that, and she said to wake you no matter what you said. She sounded like she meant it."

I hung up the phone and he went back downstairs and put the call through. I was anxious waiting for it to ring. The last time she'd called up and said it was urgent, a man turned up determined to kill us both. I snatched the phone when it rang, and she said, "Matt, I hated waking you, but it really couldn't wait."

"What's the matter?"

"It turns out there was a needle in the haystack after all. I just got off the phone with a woman named Pam. She's on her way over here."

"So?"

"She's the one we're looking for. She met those men, she got in the truck with them."

"And lived to tell the tale?"

"Barely. One of the counselors I pitched the movie story to called her right away, and she spent the past week working up the courage to call. I heard enough over the phone to know not to let this one get away.

I told her I could guarantee her a thousand dollars if she'd come over and run through her story in person. Was that all right?"

"Of course."

"But I don't have the cash. I gave you all my cash Saturday."

I looked at my watch. I had time to stop at the bank if I hurried.

"I'll get cash," I told her. "I'll be right over."

Chapter 13

"Come on in," Elaine said. "She's already here. Pam, this is Mr.

Scudder, Matthew Scudder. Matt, I'd like you to meet Pam."

She had been sitting on the couch and she arose at our approach, a slender woman, about five-three, with short dark hair and intensely blue eyes. She was wearing a dark gray skirt and a pale blue angora sweater.

Lipstick, eye shadow. High-heeled shoes. I sensed she'd chosen her outfit for our meeting, and that she wasn't sure she'd made the right choices.

Elaine, looking cool and competent in slacks and a silk blouse, said, "Sit down, Matt. Take the chair."

She joined Pam on the couch and said, "I just finished telling Pam that I got her here under false pretenses. She's not going to meet Debra Winger."

"I asked who the star was gonna be," Pam said, "and she said Debra Winger, and I'm like, wow, Debra Winger is gonna do a movie of the week? I didn't think she would do TV." She shrugged. "But I guess there's not gonna be a movie, so what difference does it make who the star is?"

"But the thousand dollars is real," Elaine said.

"Yeah, well, that's good," Pam said, "because I can use the money.

But I didn't come for the money."

"I know that, dear."

"Not just for the money."

I had the money, a thousand for her and the twelve hundred I owed Elaine and some walking-around money for myself, three thousand dollars total from my safe-deposit box.

"She said you're a detective," Pam said.

"That's right."

"And you're going after those guys. I talked a lot with the cops, I must of talked with three, four different cops—"

"When was that?"

"Right after it happened."

"And that was—?"

"Oh, I didn't realize you didn't know. It was in July, this past July."

"And you reported it to the police?"

"Jesus," she said. "What choice did I have? I had to go to the hospital, didn't I? The doctors are like, wow, who did this to you, and what am I gonna say, I slipped? I cut myself? So they called the police, naturally. I mean, even if I didn't say anything, they would of called the police."

I propped open my notebook. I said, "Pam, I don't think I got your last name."

"I didn't give it. Well, no reason not to, is there? It's Cassidy."

"And how old are you?"

"Twenty-four."

"You were twenty-three when the incident took place?"

"No, twenty-four. My birthday's the end of May."

"And what sort of work do you do, Pam?"

"Receptionist. I'm out of work at the moment, that's why I said I could use the money. I guess anybody could always use a thousand dollars, but especially now, being out of work."

"Where do you live?"

"Twenty-seventh between Third and Lex."

"Is that where you were living at the time of the incident?"

"Incident," she said, as if trying out the word. "Oh, yeah, I been there for almost three years now. Ever since I came to New York."

"Where did you come from?"

"Canton, Ohio. If you ever heard of it I can guess what for. The Pro Football Hall of Fame."

"I almost went for a visit once," I said. "I was in Massillon on business."

"Massillon! Oh, sure, I used to go there all the time. I knew a ton of people in Massillon."

"Well, I probably never met any of them," I said. "What's the address on Twenty-seventh Street, Pam?"

"One fifty-one."

"That's a nice block," Elaine said.

"Yeah, I like it okay. The only thing, it's silly, but the neighborhood doesn't have a name. It's west of Kips Bay, it's below Murray Hill, it's above Gramercy, and of course it's way east of Chelsea.

Some people started calling it Curry Hill, you know, because of all the Indian restaurants."

"You're single, Pam?" A nod. "You live alone?"

"Except for my dog. He's just a little dog but a lot of people won't break into a place if there's a dog, no matter what size he is. They're just scared of dogs, period."

"Would you like to tell me what happened, Pam?"

"The incident, you mean."

"Right."

"Yeah," she said. "I guess. That's what we're here for, right?"

* * *

IT was on a summery evening in the middle of the week. She was two blocks from her house, standing on the corner of Park and Twenty-sixth waiting for the light to change, and this truck pulled up and this guy called her over wanting directions to some place, she couldn't catch the name.

He got out of the truck, explaining that maybe he had the name of the place wrong, that it was on the invoice, and she went around with him to the rear of the truck. He opened the back of the truck, and there was another man inside, and they both had knives. They made her get in the back of the truck with the second man, and the driver got back in the truck and drove off.

AT this point I interrupted her, wanting to know why she had been so obliging about getting in the truck.

Had there been people around? Had anyone witnessed the abduction?

"I'm a little hazy on the details," she said.

"That's all right."

"It happened so quick."

Elaine said, "Pam, could I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

"You're in the game, aren't you, dear?"

I thought, Jesus, how did I miss that?

"I don't know what you mean," Pam said.

"You were working that night, weren't you?"

"How did you know?"

Elaine took the girl's hand. "It's all right," she said. "Nobody's going to hurt you, nobody's here to judge you. It's all right."

"But how did you—"

"Well, it's a popular stroll, isn't it, that stretch of Park Avenue South? But I guess I knew earlier. Honey, I was never on the pavement, but I've been in the game myself for almost twenty years."

"No!"

"Honestly. Right in this apartment, which I bought when it went co-op. I've learned to call them clients instead of tricks, and when I'm around squares I sometimes say I'm an art historian, and I've been real smart about saving my pennies over the years, but I'm in the life the same as you, dear. So you can tell it to us the way it really happened."

"God," she said. "Actually, you know something? It's a relief.

Because I didn't want to come here and tell you a story, you know? But I didn't think I had any choice."

"Because you thought we'd disapprove of you?"

"I guess. And because of what I told the cops."

"The cops didn't know you were hooking?" I asked.

"No."

"They never even brought it up? With the pickup taking place right on the stroll?"

"They were Queens cops," she said.

"Why would Queens cops catch the case?"

"Because of where I wound up. I was in Elmhurst General Hospital, that's in Queens, so that's where the cops were from. What do they know about Park Avenue South?"

"Why did you wind up at Elmhurst General? Never mind, you'll get to that. Why don't you start over from the beginning?"

"Sure," she said.

IT was a summery evening in the middle of the week. She was two blocks from her house, standing on the corner of Park and Twenty-sixth waiting for someone to hit on her, and this truck pulled up and a guy motioned for her to come over. She walked around and got in on the passenger side and he drove a block or two and turned on one of the side streets and parked at a hydrant.

She thought it would be a quick blow-job while he sat behind the wheel, twenty or twenty-five for maybe five minutes. The guys in cars almost always wanted head and they wanted to be done right there in their cars. Sometimes they wanted it while the car was moving, which seemed crazy to her, but go figure. The johns who came around on foot would generally spring for a hotel room, and the Elton at Twenty-sixth and Park was reasonable and convenient for that. There was always her apartment, but she

almost never took anybody back there unless she was desperate, because she didn't believe it was safe.

Besides, who wanted to trick in the bed you slept in?

She never saw the guy in the back until the truck was parked.

Never even knew he was there until his arm came around her neck and his hand clapped over her mouth.

He said, "Surprise, Pammy!"

God, she was scared. She just froze while the driver laughed and reached into her blouse and started feeling her tits. She had big tits and she'd learned to dress to show them on the street, in a halter top or a revealing blouse, because guys who went for tits really went for them, so you might as well show the merchandise. He went right for the nipple and tweaked it and it hurt and she knew these two were going to be rough.

"We'll all get in back," the driver said. "More privacy, room to stretch out. We might as well be comfortable, right, Pammy?"

She hated the way they said her name. She had introduced herself as Pam, not Pammy, and they said it in a mocking way, a very nasty way.

When the guy in back let go of her mouth she said, "Look, nothing rough, huh? Whatever you want, and I'll give you a real good time, but no rough stuff, okay?"

"You on drugs, Pammy?"

She said no, because she wasn't. She didn't care for drugs much.

She would smoke a joint if somebody handed it to her, and coke was nice but she never yet actually bought any. Sometimes guys would lay out lines for her, and they got insulted if you weren't interested, and anyway she liked it well enough. Maybe they thought it got her hot, made her more into it, like sometimes you would get a guy who would put a dab of coke on his dick, like that would be such a treat for you when you went down on him that he'd get extra good head on account of it.

"You a junkie, Pammy? Where do you fix, up your nose? Between your toes? You know any big drug

dealers? You got a boyfriend deals junk, maybe?"

Really stupid questions. Like there was no purpose to them, like they more or less got off on asking the questions. The one did, anyway.

The driver. He was the one all hipped on the subject of drugs. The other one was more into calling her names. "You dirty cunt, you fucking piece-of-shit bitch," like that.

Sickening if you let it get to you but actually a lot of guys were like that, especially when they got excited.

One guy, she must have done him four, five times, always in his car, and he was always very polite before and after, very considerate, never rough, but it was always the same story when she was copping his joint and he was getting close to getting off. "Oh, you cunt, you cunt, I wish you were dead. Oh, I wish you would die, I wish you were dead, you fucking cunt." Horrible, just horrible, but except for that he was a perfect gentleman and he paid fifty dollars each time and never took long to come, so what was the big deal if he had a nasty mouth? Sticks and stones, right?

They went in the back of the truck and it was all fixed up with a mattress, which made it comfortable, actually, or it would have been comfortable if she could have relaxed, but you couldn't, not with these guys, because they were too weird. How could you relax?

They made her take everything off, every stitch, which was a pain in the ass but she knew not to argue.

And then, well, they fucked her, taking turns, first the driver, then the other one. That part was pretty much routine, except of course that there were the two of them, and when the second man was doing her the driver pinched her nipples. That hurt, but she knew better than to say anything, and anyway she knew he was aware that it hurt. That was why he was doing it.

They both did her and they both got off, which was encouraging, because it was when a guy couldn't get it up or couldn't finish that you were sometimes in danger, because they got mad at you, like it was your fault. After the second one groaned and rolled off of her she said, "Hey, that was great. You guys are all right. Let me get dressed, huh?"

That was when they showed her the knife.

A switchblade, a big one, really skanky-looking. The second man, the one with the dirty mouth, had the knife, and he said, "You ain't going nowhere, you fucking cunt."

And Ray said, "We're all going somewhere, we're going for a little ride, Pammy."

That was his name, Ray. The other one called him Ray, that's how she knew it. The other one's name, if she heard it then it never registered, because she didn't have a clue. But the driver was Ray.

Except they switched, so he wasn't the driver now. The other one climbed over the seat and got behind the wheel and Ray stayed in back with her, and he kept the knife, and of course he didn't let her put on her clothes.

This was where it started getting really hard to remember. She was in the back of the truck and it was dark and she couldn't see out and they drove and drove and she didn't have any idea where they were or where they were going. Ray asked her about drugs again, he was hipped on the subject, he told her junkies were just looking to die, that it was a death trip, and that they should all get what they were looking for.

He made her go down on him. That was better, at least he would shut up, and at least she was, like, doing something.

Then they were parked again, God knows where, and then there was a lot of sex. They took turns with her and they just did stuff for a long time, and she was like zoning in and out, like she wasn't really a hundred percent there for part of the time. She was pretty sure that neither of them came. They both got off the first time, on Twenty-fourth Street or wherever it was, but now it was like they didn't want to come because that would break up the party. They did it to her in, well, all the usual places, and they put other things inside her besides parts of themselves. She wasn't really too clear on what they used. Some of what they did hurt and some didn't and it was awful, it was all terrible, and then she remembered something, she hadn't remembered this before, but there was a point where she got really peaceful.

Because, see, she knew she was going to die. And it's not like she wanted to die, because she didn't, she definitely didn't, but the thought somehow came to her that that's what was going to happen, and that was all that was going to happen, and she thought, well, like I can handle that. Like I can live with it, almost, which was ridiculous because that was the point, she couldn't live, not if she died.

"Okay, I can handle that." Just like that, really.

And then, just as she had really come to terms with it, just as she was enjoying this feeling of peacefulness, Ray said, "You know what, Pammy? You're going to get a chance. We're going to let you live."

The two of them argued then, because the other man wanted to kill her, but Ray said they could let her go, that she was a whore, that nobody cared about whores.

But she wasn't just any whore, he said. She had the best set of tits on the street. He said, "Do you like

'em, Pammy? Are you proud of them?"

She didn't know what she was supposed to say.

"Which one's your favorite? Come on, eeny meeny miney mo, pick one. Pammy. Pam-mee"— singsong, like a taunting child— "pick a titty, Pammy. Which one's your favorite?"

And he had something in his hand, sort of a loop of wire, coppery in the dim light.

"Pick the one you want to keep, Pammy. One for you and one for me, that's fair, isn't it, Pam-mee? You can keep one and I'll take the other one, and it's your choice, Pam-mee, you have to choose, you hot little bitch, you have to pick one. It's Pammy's choice, you remember Sophie's Choice, but that was tots and this is tits, Pam-mee, and you better pick one or I'll take them both."

God, he was crazy, and what was she supposed to do, how could she pick one breast? There had to be a way to win this game but she couldn't think what it was.

"Look at that, look at that, I touch them and the nipples get hard, you get hot even when you're scared, even when you're crying, you little cunt, you. Pick one, Pammy. Which one will it be? This one? This one?

What are you waiting for, Pammy? Are you trying to stall? Are you trying to make me angry?

Come on, Pammy. Come on. Touch the one you want to keep."

God, what was she supposed to do?

"That one? Are you sure, Pammy?"

God—

"Well, I think it's a good choice, an excellent choice, so that one's yours and this one's mine and a deal's a deal and a trade's a trade and no trades back, Pam-mee."

The wire was a circle around her breast, and there was a wooden handle attached to each end of the wire, like the kind they slipped under the string of a package so you could carry it, and he held the handles and drew his hands apart, and—

And she was out of her body, just like that, floating without a body, up in the air above the truck and able to look down through the roof of the truck, watching, watching as the wire slipped through her flesh as if through a liquid, watching the breast slide slowly away from the rest of her, watching the blood seep.

Watching until the blood filled up the whole of her vision, watching it darken, darken, until the world went black.

Chapter 14

Kelly was away from his desk. The man who answered his phone at Brooklyn Homicide said he could try to have him paged, if it was important. I said it was important.

When the phone rang Elaine answered it, said, "Just a minute," and nodded. I took the phone from her and said hello.

"My dad remembers you," he said. "Said you were real eager."

"Well, that was a while ago."

"So he said. What's so important they got to beep me in the middle of a meal?"

"I have a question about Leila Alvarez."

"You got a question. I thought you had something for me."

"About the surgery she had."

" 'Surgery.' That what you want to call it?"

"Do you know what he used to sever the breast?"

"Yeah, a fucking guillotine. Where are you coming from with the questions, Scudder?"

"Could he have used a piece of wire? Piano wire, say, used almost like a garrote?"

There was a long pause, and I wondered if I'd pronounced the word incorrectly and he didn't know what I meant. Then, his voice tight, he said, "What the fuck are you sitting on?"

"I've been sitting on it for ten minutes, and I've spent five of them waiting for you to call back."

"God damn it, what have you got, mister?"

"Alvarez wasn't their only victim."

"So you said. Also Gotteskind. I read the file and I think you're right, but where did you get piano wire with Gottes-kind?"

"There's another victim," I said. "Raped, tortured, a breast severed.

The difference is she's alive. I figured you'd want to talk to her."

DREW Kaplan said, "Pro bono, huh? You like to tell me why those are the two Latin words everybody knows? By the time I got through Brooklyn Law I'd learned enough Latin to start my own church.

Res gestae, corpus juris, lex talionis. Nobody ever says these words to me. Just pro bono. You know what it means, pro bono?"

"I'm sure you'll tell me."

"The full phrase is pro bono publico. For the public good. Which is why big corporate law firms use the phrase to refer to the minuscule amount of legal work which they deign to undertake for causes they believe in as a sop to their consciences, which are understandably troubled by virtue of the fact that they spend upwards of ninety percent of their time grinding the faces of the poor and billing upwards of two hundred dollars an hour for it. Why are you looking at me like that?"

"That's the longest sentence I've ever heard you speak."

"Is that right? Miss Cassidy, as your attorney it's my duty to caution you against associating with men like this gentleman. Matt, seriously, Miss Cassidy's a Manhattan resident, the victim of a crime which took place nine months ago in the borough of Queens. I'm a struggling lawyer with modest offices on Court Street in the borough of Brooklyn. So how, if you don't mind my asking, do I come into it?"

We were in his modest offices, and the banter was just his way of breaking the ice, because he already knew why Pam Cassidy needed a Brooklyn lawyer to see her through interrogation by a Brooklyn homicide detective. I had gone over the situation with him at some length on the phone.

"I'm going to call you Pam," he said now. "Is that all right with you?"

"Oh, sure."

"Or do you prefer Pammy?"

"No, Pam's fine. Just so it's not Pammy."

The special significance of that would have been lost on Kaplan.

He said, "It'll be Pam, then. Pam, before you and I go down to see Officer Kelly— it's Officer, Matt? Or Detective?"

"Detective John Kelly."

"Before we meet with the good detective, let's get our signals straight. You're my client. That means I don't want you questioned by anyone unless I'm at your side. Do you understand?"

"Sure."

"That means from anyone, cops, press, TV reporters sticking microphones in your face. 'You'll have to speak with my attorney.' Let me hear you say that."

"You'll have to speak with my attorney."

"Perfect. Somebody calls you on the phone, asks you what the weather's like outside, what do you say?"

"You'll have to speak with my attorney."

"I think she's got it. One more. Guy calls you on the phone, says you've just won a free trip to Paradise Island in the Bahamas in connection with a special promotion they're running. What do you say?"

"You'll have to speak with my attorney."

"No, him you can tell to fuck off. Everybody else on the planet, however, they have to speak to your attorney. Now we'll go over some specifics, but generally speaking I only want you answering questions when I'm present, and only if they relate directly to the outrageous crime which was committed upon your person. Your background, your life before the incident, your life since the incident, none of that is anybody's business. If a line of questioning is introduced that I object to, I'll cut in and stop you from answering. If I don't say anything, but if for any reason whatsoever the question bothers you, you don't answer it. You say that you want to confer privately with your attorney. 'I want to confer privately with my attorney.' Let's hear you say that."

"I want to confer privately with my attorney."

"Excellent. The point is you're not charged with anything and you're not going to be charged with anything, so you're doing them a favor in the first place, which puts us in a very good position. Now let's just go over the background one time while we've got Matt here, and then you and I can go see Detective Kelly, Pam. Tell me how you happened to ask Matthew Scudder to try to track down the men who abducted and assaulted you?"

WE had worked out the details before I'd called either John Kelly or Drew Kaplan. Pam needed a story that would make her the initiator of the investigation and leave Kenan Khoury out of it. She and Elaine and I batted it around, and this is what we came up with: Pam, nine months after the incident, was trying to get on with her life. This was rendered more difficult by the dread she had that she would be victimized again by the same men. She had even thought of leaving New York to get away from them but felt the fear would remain with her no matter how far she fled.

Recently she had been with a man to whom she had told the story of the loss of her breast. This fellow, who was a respectable married man and whose name she would not under any circumstances divulge, was shocked and sympathetic. He told her she would not rest easy until the men were caught, and that even if it was impossible to find them it would almost certainly be helpful to her emotional recovery if she herself took some action toward their discovery and apprehension. Since the police had had ample time to investigate and had evidently accomplished nothing, it was his recommendation that she engage a private investigator who could concentrate wholeheartedly upon the case instead of practicing the sort of criminological triage required of policemen.

There was in fact a private operative he knew and trusted, because this nameless fellow had been a client of mine in the past. He had sent her to me, and in addition had agreed to cover my fee and expenses, with the understanding that his role in all of this would not be divulged to anyone under any circumstances.

A couple of interviews with Pam had suggested to me that the most effective way to approach the case was by assuming that she had not been their only victim. Indeed, the way they had discussed killing her seemed to indicate that they had in fact committed murder. I had accordingly tried multiple approaches designed to turn up evidence of crimes committed by the same two men either before or after the maiming of my client.

Library research had turned up two cases which I considered likely, Marie Gotteskind and Leila Alvarez. The Gotteskind case involved abduction by means of a truck, and by securing the Gotteskind file through unconventional channels I had confirmed that it had also involved an amputation. The Alvarez case looked like probable abduction, and was similar, too, in that the victim was abandoned in a cemetery. (Pam had been dropped in Mount Zion Cemetery, in Queens.) When I learned on Thursday that Alvarez's mutilation, unspecified in the newspaper account, had been identical to Pam's, it seemed self-evident to me that the same criminals were involved.

So why didn't I say anything to Kelly at the time? Most important, I couldn't ethically do so without my client's permission, and I had spent the weekend talking her into it and preparing her for what she would have to face. In addition, I wanted to see if any of the other hooks I had in the water would bring in a bite.

One of these was the movie-of-the-week pitch, which I'd had Elaine try on various sex-crime units around town in the hope of turning up a living victim. Several women had called, although none had proved even remote possibilities, but I'd wanted to wait until the weekend was over before giving up on the line of inquiry.

Amusingly enough, Pam herself had gotten a telephone call from a woman at the Queens unit, suggesting that she might find it worth her while to contact this Miss Mardell and see what it was all about. At the time she'd had no idea we were trying this particular approach, so she'd been very uncertain with the woman on the phone, but then we all had a good laugh when she mentioned it to me and found out who this movie producer really was.

As of this afternoon, Monday, I couldn't see any justification for withholding information from the police, since our so doing would unquestionably hamper their investigation of the two homicides, and since I had no useful course to pursue on my own. I had managed to sell this argument to Pam, who was still more than a little wary of being interrogated again by police officers, but who was more sanguine about it when I told her she could have a lawyer looking after her interests.

And so they were on their way to see Kelly, and I was done chasing lust murderers, and that was that.

"I THINK it'll play," I told Elaine. "I think it covers everything, all the activities I've engaged in since the first call I got, except for anything that has to do with Khoury. I don't see how anything Pam might tell them could lead them toward the investigation I conducted on Atlantic Avenue or the computer games I watched the Kongs play last night. Pam doesn't know about any of that so she couldn't spill it even if she wanted to, she never heard the names of Francine or Kenan Khoury. Come to think of it, I'm not sure she knows why I got into the case in the first place. I think all she knows is her cover story."

"Maybe she believes it."

"She probably will by the time she's done telling it. Kaplan thought it sounded fine."

"Did you tell him the real story?"

"No, there was no reason to do that. He knows what he's got is incomplete, but he can be comfortable with it. The important thing is that he'll keep the cops from ganging up on her and paying more attention to my role in the case than to who did it."

"Would they do that?"

I shrugged. "I don't know what they'd do. There's a team of serial killers who've been doing their little number for over a year now and the NYPD doesn't even know they exist. It's going to put a lot of people's noses out of joint to have a private detective come up with what everybody else missed."

"So they'll kill the messenger."

"It wouldn't be the first time. Actually the cops didn't miss anything obvious. It's very easy to miss serial murder, especially when different precincts and boroughs get different cases and the unifying elements are the kind that don't make it into newspaper stories. But they could still hold it against Pam for showing them up, especially given that she's a hooker and that she didn't mention that little tidbit first time around."

"Is she going to mention is now?"

"She's going to mention now that she used to make ends meet by occasionally prostituting herself. We know they've got a sheet on her, she was booked a couple of times for prostitution and loitering with intent. They didn't find that out when they investigated her case because she was the victim, so there was no compelling need to determine whether she had a record."

"But you think they should have checked."

"Well, it was pretty sloppy," I said. "Hookers are targets for this all the time because they're so accessible. They could have checked. It should have been automatic."

"But she's going to tell them she stopped hooking after she got home from the hospital. That she was afraid to go back to it."

I nodded. She had quit for a while, scared to death at the thought of getting into a car with a stranger, but old habits die hard and she'd gone back to it. At first she limited herself to car dates, not wanting to risk disappointing or disgusting a man by taking off her shirt, but she'd found that most men didn't mind her deformity that much. Some found it an interesting peculiarity, while a small minority were extremely excited by it, and became regular clients.

But nobody had to know any of that. So she would be telling them that she had had a couple of jobs waitressing, working off the books in the neighborhood, and that she was being more or less kept by the anonymous benefactor who had referred her to me.

"And what about you?" Elaine wanted to know. "Aren't you going to have to see Kelly and give him a statement?"

"I suppose so, but there's no rush. I'll talk to him tomorrow and see if he needs anything formal from me.

He may not. I don't have anything for him, really, because I didn't uncover any evidence. I just spotted some invisible links between three existing cases."

"So for you ze war is over, mein Kapitän?"

"Looks that way."

"I'll bet you're exhausted. Do you want to go in the other room and lie down?"

"I'd rather stay up so that I can get back on my normal schedule."

"Makes sense. Are you hungry? Oh my God, you haven't eaten anything since breakfast, have you? Sit there, I'll fix us something."

WE had a tossed salad and a big bowl of butterfly pasta with oil and garlic. We ate at the kitchen table, and afterward she made tea for herself and coffee for me and we went into the living room and sat together on the couch. At one point she said something uncharacteristically coarse; when I laughed she asked me what was so funny.

I said, "I love it when you talk street."

"You think it's a pose, huh? You think I'm some sheltered hothouse blossom, don't you?"

"No, I think you're the rose of Spanish Harlem."

"I wonder if I could have made it on the street," she said thoughtfully. "I'm glad I never had to find out.

I'll tell you one thing, though. When this is all over Little Miss Street Smarts is going to come in out of the cold. She can just bundle up her remaining tit and get the hell off the pavement."

"Are you planning on adopting her?"

"No, and we're damn well not going to be roommates and do each other's hair, either. But I can get her a place in a decent house or show her how to build a book and work out of her apartment. If she's smart you know what she'll do? Run a couple of ads in Screw letting the tit fanciers out there know they can now get one for the price of two.

You're laughing again, was that street talk?"

"No, it was just funny."

"Then you're allowed to laugh. I don't know, maybe I should just butt out and let her live her life. But I liked her."

"So did I."

"I think she deserves better than the street."

"Everybody does," I said. "She may come out of this all right. If they get the guys and there's a trial, she could have her allotted fifteen minutes of fame. And she's got a lawyer who'll make sure that nobody gets her story without paying her for it."

"Maybe there'll be a TV movie."

"I wouldn't rule it out, although I don't think we can count on Debra Winger playing our friend."

"No, probably not. Oh, I got it. Are you with me on this? What you do, you get an actress to play her who's a postmastectomy patient in real life. I mean, are we talking high concept here or what? You see what a statement we'd be making?" She winked. "That's my show-biz persona. I bet you like my street act better."

"I'd call it a toss-up."

"Fair enough. Matt? Does it bother you to work on a case like this and then hand it over to the police?"

"No."

"Really?"

"Why should it? I couldn't justify keeping it to myself. The NYPD

has resources and manpower I don't have. I'd taken it as far as I could, that end of it, anyway. I'll still follow up the lead I got last night and see what I can turn up in Sunset Park."

"You're not telling the police about Sunset Park."

"No way to do that."

"No, Matt? I have a question."

"Go ahead."

"I don't know if you want to hear it, but I have to ask. Are you sure it's the same killers?"

"Has to be. A piece of wire used to amputate a breast? Once with Leila Alvarez, once with Pam Cassidy? Both victims dumped in cemeteries? Give me a break."

"I was assuming that the ones who did Pam also did the Alvarez girl. And the woman in Forest Park, the schoolteacher."

"Marie Gotteskind."

"But what about Francine Khoury? She was not dumped in a cemetery, she did not necessarily have a breast amputated with a garrote, and she was reportedly snatched by three men. If there was one thing Pam was positive of it was that there were only two men. Ray and the other one."

"There could have been just two with Khoury."

"You said—"

"I know what I said. Pam also said that they went from the driver's seat to the back of the truck and back again. Maybe it just looked as though there were three people because when you see two guys enter the back of a truck and then it pulls away you assume somebody was up front to drive it."

"Maybe."

"We know these guys did Gotteskind. Gotteskind and Alvarez are tied together by the business with the fingers, amputation and insertion, and Alvarez and Cassidy both had the breast cut off, so that means—"

"They're all three the same. All right, I follow that."

"Well, the Gotteskind eyewitnesses also said there were three men, two who did the snatching and one who drove. That could have been an illusion. Or they could have had three that day, and again the day they did Francine, but one guy was home with the flu the night they picked up Pam."

"Home jerking off," she said.

"Whatever. We could ask Pam if there were any references to another man. 'Mike would like her ass,'

something like that."

"Maybe they took her breast home for Mike."

" 'Hey, Mike you should have seen the one that got away.' "

"Spare me, will you? Do you think they'll get a decent description out of her?"

"I couldn't." She'd said she didn't remember what the two men looked like, that when she tried to picture them she saw wholly undefined faces, as if they'd been wearing nylon stockings as masks.

That had made the original investigation an exercise in futility when they gave her books full of sex-offender mug shots to pore over. She didn't know what faces she was looking for. They'd tried her with an Identi-Kit technician and that had been hopeless, too.

"When she was here," she said, "I kept thinking of Ray Galindez."

He was an NYPD cop and an artist, with an uncanny ability to hook up with a witness and extract a remarkable likeness. Two of his sketches, matted and framed, were on Elaine's bathroom wall.

"I had the same thought," I said, "but I don't know what he could get out of her. If he'd worked with her a day or two after it happened he might have got somewhere. Now it's been too long."

"What about hypnosis?"

"It's possible. She must have blocked the memory, and a hypnotist could possibly unblock her. I don't know that much about it. Juries don't necessarily trust it, and I'm not sure I do either."

"Why not?"

"I think hypnotized witnesses can create memories out of their imaginations because of a desire to please. I'm suspicious of a lot of the incest memories I hear about in meetings, memories that suddenly surface twenty or thirty years after the event. I'm sure some of them are real, but I get the sense that more than a few of them are summoned up out of the whole cloth because the patient wants to make her therapist happy."

"Sometimes it's real."

"No question. But sometimes it's not."

"Maybe. I'll grant you it's the trauma du jour these days. Pretty soon women without incest memories are going to start worrying that their fathers thought they were ugly. You want to play I'm a naughty little girl and you're my daddy?"

"I don't think so."

"You're no fun. You want to play I'm a hip slick and cool street hooker and you're sitting behind the wheel of your car?"

"Would I have to go rent a car?"

"We could pretend the couch is a car, but that might be a stretch.

What can we do that'll keep our relationship exciting and hot? I'd tie you up but I know you. You'd just go to sleep."

"Especially tonight."

"Uh-huh. We could pretend you're into deformities and I'm missing a breast."

"God forbid."

"Yeah, amen to that. I don't want to beshrei it, as my mother would say. You know from beshrei? I think it means inviting a Yiddish equivalent of hubris. 'Don't even say it, you might give God ideas.' "

"Well, don't."

"No. Honey? Do you want to just go to bed?"

"Now you're talking."

Chapter 15

Tuesday I slept late, and Elaine was gone when I woke up. A note on the kitchen table told me to stay as long as I wanted. I helped myself to breakfast and watched CNN for a while. Then I went out and walked around for an hour or so, winding up at the Citicorp Building in time for the noon meeting.

Afterward I went to a movie on Third Avenue, walked to the Frick and looked at the paintings, then took a bus down Lexington and caught a five-thirty meeting a block from Grand Central, commuters bracing themselves to pass up the club car.

The meeting was on the Eleventh Step, the one about seeking to know God's will through prayer and meditation, and most of the discussion was relentlessly spiritual. When I got out I decided to treat myself to a cab. Two sailed past me, and when a third one pulled up a woman in a tailored suit and flowing bow tie elbowed me out of the way and beat me to it. I hadn't done any praying or meditating, but I didn't have a whole lot of trouble figuring out God's will in the matter. He wanted me to go home by subway.

There were messages to call John Kelly, Drew Kaplan, and Kenan Khoury. That struck me as an awful lot of people with the same last initial, and I hadn't even heard from the Kongs yet. There was a fourth message from someone who hadn't left a name, just a number; perversely, that was the call I returned first.

I dialed the number, and instead of ringing it responded with a tone. I decided I'd been disconnected and hung up, and then I got it and dialed again, and when the tone sounded I punched in my phone number and hung up.

Within five minutes my phone rang. I picked it up and TJ said,

"Hey, Matt, my man. What's happenin'?"

"You got a beeper."

"Surprised you, huh? Man, I had five hundred dollars all at once.

What you 'spect me to do, buy a savings bond? They was havin' a special, you got the beeper and the first three months' service for a hundred an' ninety-nine dollars. You want one, I'll go to the store with you, make sure they treat you right."

"I'll wait awhile. What happens after three months? They take the beeper back?"

"No, I own it, man. I just got to pay so much a month to keep it on-line. I stop payin', I still own it, but you call it an' nothin' happens."

"Not much point in owning it then."

"Lotta dudes got 'em, though. Wear 'em all the time an' you never hear 'em beep because they ain't paid to stay on-line."

"What's the monthly charge?"

"They told me but I forget. Don't matter. Way I figure, by the time the three months is up you'll be pickin'

up the monthly tab for me just to have me at your beck an' call."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because I indispensable, man. I a key asset to your operation."

"Because you're resourceful."

"See? You're getting it."

I TRIED Drew but he wasn't at his office and I didn't want to bother him at home. I didn't call Kenan Khoury or John Kelly, figuring they could wait. I stopped around the corner for a slice of pizza and a Coke and went to St. Paul's for my third meeting of the day. I couldn't recall the last time I'd gone to that many, but it had certainly been a while.

It wasn't because I felt in danger of drinking. The thought of a drink had never been further from my mind. Nor did I feel beset by problems, or unable to reach a decision.

What I did feel, I realized, was a sense of depletion, of exhaustion.

The all-nighter at the Frontenac had taken its toll, but its effects had been pretty much offset by a couple of good meals and nine hours of uninterrupted sleep. But I was still very much at the effect of the case itself. I had worked hard on it, letting it absorb me entirely, and now it was finished.

Except, of course, that it wasn't. The killers had not even been identified, let alone apprehended. I had done what I recognized as excellent detective work and it had produced significant results, but the case itself had not been brought to anything like a conclusion. So the exhaustion I felt wasn't part of a glorious feeling of completion. Tired or not, I had promises to keep. And miles to go.

So I was at another meeting, a safe and restful place. I talked with Jim Faber during the break, and walked out with him at the end of the meeting. He didn't have time to get a cup of coffee but I walked him most of the way to his apartment and we wound up standing on a street corner and talking for a few minutes. Then I went home and once again I didn't call Kenan Khoury, but I did call his brother. His name had come up in my conversation with Jim, and neither of us could remember having seen him in the past week. So I dialed Peter's number but there was no answer. I called Elaine and we talked for a few minutes. She mentioned that Pam Cassidy had called to say she wouldn't be calling—

i.e., Drew had told her not to be in touch with me or Elaine for the time being, and she wanted to let Elaine know so she wouldn't worry.

I called Drew first thing the next morning and he said everything had gone well enough and he'd found Kelly hardnosed but not unreasonable. "If you want to wish for something," he suggested, "wish that the guy turns out to be rich."

"Kelly? You don't get rich in Homicide. There's no graft in it."

"Not Kelly, for God's sake. Ray."

"Who?"

"The killer," he said. "The one with the wire, for God's sake. Don't you listen to your own client?"

She wasn't my client, but he didn't know that. I asked him why on earth we would want Ray to turn out to be rich.

"So we can sue his ass off."

"I was hoping to see it locked up for the rest of his life."

"Yeah, I have the same hope," he said, "but we both know what can happen in criminal court. But one thing I damn well know is that if they so much as indict the son of a bitch I can get a civil judgment for every dime he's got. But that's only worth something if he's got a few bucks."

"You never know," I said. What I did know was that there weren't too many millionaires living in Sunset Park, but I didn't want to mention Sunset Park to Kaplan, and anyway I had no reason to assume that both of them, or all three of them if we were dealing with three, actually lived there. For all I knew, Ray had a suite at the Pierre.

"I know I'd like to find somebody to sue," he said. "Maybe the bastards used a company truck. I'd like to find some collateral defendant somewhere down the line so that I can at least get her a decent settlement. She deserves it after what she went through."

"And that way your pro bono work would turn out to be cost-effective, wouldn't it?"

"So? There's nothing wrong with that, but I've got to tell you that my end of it isn't my chief concern.

Seriously."

"Okay."

"She's a damn good kid," he said. "Tough and gutsy, but there's a core of innocence about her, do you know what I mean?"

"I know."

"And those bastards really put her through it. Did she show you what they did to her?"

"She told me."

"She told me, too, but she also showed me. You think the knowledge prepares you, but believe me, the visual impact is staggering."

"No kidding," I said. "Did she also show you what she's got left, so you could appreciate the extent of her loss?"

"You've got a dirty mind, you know that?"

"I know," I said. "At least that's what everybody tells me."

I CALLED John Kelly's office and was told he was in court. When I gave my name the cop I was talking to said, "Oh, he'll want to talk to you. Give me your number, I'll beep him for you." A little while later Kelly got back to me and we arranged to meet at a place called The Docket around the corner from Borough Hall. The place was new to me, but it felt just like places I knew in downtown Manhattan, bar-restaurants with a clientele that ran to cops and lawyers and a decor that featured a lot of brass and leather and dark wood.

Kelly and I had never met, a point we both overlooked when we set up the meeting, but as it turned out I had no trouble recognizing him.

He looked just like his father.

"I been hearing that all my life," he said.

He picked up his beer from the bar and we took a table in back.

Our waitress had a snub nose and infectious good humor, and she knew my companion. When he asked her about the pastrami she said,

"It's not lean enough for you, Kelly. Take the roast beef." We had roast beef sandwiches on rye, the meat sliced thin and piled high, accompanied by crisp french fries and a horseradish sauce that would bring tears to the eyes of a statue.

"Good place," I said.

"Can't beat it. I eat here all the time."

He had a second bottle of Molson's with his sandwich. I ordered a cream soda, and when that got a headshake from the waitress I said I'd have a Coke. I saw this register with Kelly, although he didn't comment at the time. When she brought our drinks, though, he said, "You used to drink."

"Your father mentioned that? I wasn't hitting it all that heavy when I knew him."

"I didn't get it from him. I made a few calls, asked around. I hear you had your troubles with it and then you stopped."

"You could say that."

"AA, I heard. Great organization, everything I hear of it."

"It has its good points. But it's no place to be if you want a decent drink."

It took him a second to realize I was joking. He laughed, then said,

"That where you know him from?

The mysterious boyfriend?"

"I'm not going to answer that."

"You're not prepared to tell me anything about him."

"No."

"That's okay, I'm not about to give you a lot of grief on the subject.

You got her to come in, I have to give you that. I don't exactly love it when a witness shows up holding hands with her lawyer, but under the circumstances I got to admit it's the right move for her. And Kaplan's not too much of a sleaze. He'll make you look like a monkey in court if he can, but what the hell, that's his job, and they're all like that.

What are you going to do, hang the whole profession?"

"There are people who wouldn't think it was such a bad idea."

"You're talking about half the people in this room," he said, "and the other half are attorneys themselves.

But what the hell. Kaplan and I agreed to keep this dark as far as the press is concerned. He said he was sure you'd go along."

"Of course."

"If we had a good sketch of the two perps it'd be different, but I put her together with an artist and the best we could come up with is they each got two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. She's not too sure about ears, thinks they had two apiece but doesn't want to commit herself. Be like running a picture of a smile button on page five of the Daily News:

'Have You Seen This Man?' What we got is linkage of three cases which we're now officially treating as serial homicide, but do you see any advantage in making it public? Besides scaring the shit out of people, what do you accomplish?"

* * *

WE didn't linger over lunch. He had to be back by two to testify in the trial of a drug-related homicide, which was the sort of thing that kept him from ever getting his desk clear. "And it's hard to keep on giving a shit if they kill each other," he said, "or to break your back trying to nail them for it. I wish to hell they'd legalize all that shit, and I honest to Christ never thought I'd hear myself say that."

"I never thought I'd hear any cop say it."

"You hear it all the time now. Cops, DAs, everybody. There's still DEA guys playing the same old tune.

'We're winning the war on drugs. Give us the tools and we can do the job.' I don't know, maybe they believe it, but you're better off believing in the Tooth Fairy. Least that way you might wind up with a quarter under your pillow."

"How can you rationalize making crack legal?"

"I know, it's a pisser. My all-time favorite is angel dust. An ordinary peaceable guy'll go get himself dusted, and he goes straight into a blackout and acts out violently. Then he wakes up hours later and somebody's dead and he doesn't remember a thing, he can't even tell you if he enjoyed the high. Would I like to see them selling dust at the corner candy store? Jesus, I can't say I would, but would they move any more of it that way than they do right now, selling it on the street in front of the candy store?"

"I don't know."

"Neither does anybody else. As a matter of fact they're not selling that much angel dust these days, but it's not because people are going away for it. Crack's taking a lot of the dust market. So there's good news from the world of drugs, sports fans. Crack is helping us win that war."

We split the check, and on the sidewalk we shook hands. I agreed to get in touch if I thought of anything he ought to know about, and he said he'd keep me posted if they got any kind of a break in the case. "I can tell you there'll be some manpower on it," he said. "These are guys we really want to take off the street."

I HAD told Kenan Khoury I'd be out later that afternoon, so I headed in that direction. The Docket is on Joralemon Street, where Brooklyn Heights butts up against Cobble Hill. I walked east to Court Street and down Court to Atlantic, passing Drew Kaplan's law office and the Syrian place I'd gone to with Peter Khoury. I turned on Atlantic so that I could pass Ayoub's and visualize the kidnapping in situ, which was another Latin phrase Drew could put in the basket with pro bono. I thought I'd take a bus south, but when I got to Fourth Avenue a bus was just pulling away from the curb, and it was a beautiful spring day anyway and I was enjoying the walk.

I walked for a couple of hours. I never consciously planned on walking all the way to Bay Ridge, but that's what I wound up doing. At first I just thought I'd walk eight or ten blocks and then catch the first bus that came along. By the time I got to the first of the numbered streets I realized I was only about a mile from Green-Wood Cemetery. I cut over to Fifth Avenue and walked to the cemetery and went in, strolling for ten or fifteen minutes among the graves. The grass was bright the way it never is except in early spring, and there were a lot of spring bulbs in bloom around the headstones, along with other flowers that had been placed in urns.

The cemetery covers a vast expanse of ground and I had no idea in what section of it Leila Alvarez had been lost and found, although there may well have been some indication in the news story. If so I had long since forgotten, and what difference did it make, anyway? I wasn't going to psych out anything by tuning in to the vibrations emanating from the patch of grass on which she'd lain. I'm willing to believe that some people can operate that way, that they can use willow twigs to find lost objects and missing children, even that they can see auras that escape my vision (although I wasn't sure I'd grant such powers to Danny Boy's latest girlfriend). But I couldn't.

Still, just being in a place might jog a thought loose, allow a mental connection that might otherwise never be made. Who knows how the process works?

Maybe I went there looking for some kind of connection to the Alvarez girl. Maybe I just wanted to spend a few minutes walking on green grass, and looking at the flowers.

I ENTERED the cemetery at Twenty-fifth Street and left it half a mile south at Thirty-fourth. By this point I had made my way through all of Park Slope and was on the northern edge of the Sunset Park section, and just a couple of blocks from the small park that gave the neighborhood its name.

I walked to the park, and across it. Then, one by one, I made my way to all six of the pay phones that had been used to call the Khoury house, starting with the one on New Utrecht Avenue at Forty-first Street.

The one I was most interested in was on Fifth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth. That was the phone they had used twice, the one that thus figured to be closest to their base of operations. Unlike the other phones, it was not located on the street but just inside the entrance of a twenty-four-hour laundromat.

There were two women in the place, both of them fat. One was folding laundry while the other sat in a chair tipped back against the concrete-block wall and read a copy of People magazine with Sandra Dee's picture on the cover. Neither of them paid any attention to the other, or to me. I dropped a quarter in the phone and called Elaine.

When she picked up I said, "Do all laundromats have telephones? Is it a regular thing, are you always going to find a pay phone in a laundromat?"

"Do you have any idea how many years I've been waiting for you to ask me that?"

"Well?"

"It's flattering that you think I know everything, but I have to tell you something. I haven't set foot inside a laundromat in years. In fact I'm not sure I've ever been in one. We have machines in the basement. So I can't answer your question, but I can ask you one. Why?"

"Two of the calls to Khoury the night of the kidnapping came from a laundromat pay phone in Sunset Park."

"And you're there right now. You're calling me from that very phone."

"Right."

"And? Why does it matter if other laundromats have phones? Don't tell me, I'll figure it out for myself. I can't figure it out for myself.

Why?"

"I was thinking they'd have to live very close for it to occur to them to use this phone. You can't see it from the street, so unless you lived within a block or two of it you wouldn't think of it when you needed to make a phone call. Unless every laundromat in the world has a phone."

"Well, I don't know about laundromats. There's no phone in our basement. What do you do about laundry?"

"Me? There's a laundry around the corner."

"They have a phone?"

"I don't know. I drop it off in the morning and pick it up at night, if I remember. They do everything. I give it to them dirty and it comes back clean."

"I bet they don't separate colors."

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

I left the laundromat and had a café con leche at the Cuban lunch counter at the corner. They'd talked on that phone, the sons of bitches. I was that close to them.

They had to live in the neighborhood. And not just in the general area, but almost certainly within a block or two of the laundromat. It wasn't hard for me to start believing I could feel their presence somewhere within a few hundred yards of where I was sitting. But that was a lot of crap. I didn't have to pick up vibrations, all I had to do was figure out what must have happened.

They picked her up when she left the house, tailed her to D'Agostino's, laid off when the bag boy walked her to her car, then tailed her again to Atlantic Avenue. They made the snatch when she came out of Ayoub's and drove off with her in the back of the truck. And headed where?

Any of dozens of places. Some side street in Red Hook. An alleyway behind a warehouse. A garage.

There was a gap of several hours between the kidnapping and the first phone call, and I figured they had spent a good portion of those hours doing to her what they had done to Pam Cassidy. After she was dead they'd have headed for home, parked in their own parking space if they weren't there already. The truck, which had borne lettering identifying it as the vehicle of a TV outfit in Queens, would get some cosmetic attention. They'd paint over the lettering— or just wash it off, if they'd applied washable paint to begin with. If they had the right setup in their garage, the truck might get a whole change of color.

Then what? A quick course in Meat-cutting for Beginners? They could have done that then, could have waited until afterward. It didn't matter.

Then, at 3:38, the first call. At 4:01, the second call— Ray's first call— from the laundromat. More calls, until at 8:01 the sixth call sent the Khourys off to deliver the money. Having made that call, Ray or another man would get in position to watch the pay phone at Flatbush and Farragut, dialing its number when Kenan approached.

Or was that necessary? They'd told Kenan to be there at eight-thirty. They could have called the phone at one-minute intervals starting a few minutes before the appointed hour; whenever Khoury arrived and answered the phone, he'd have the impression that they'd called when he and his brother drove up.

Immaterial. However they did it, they made the call and Kenan answered it and they went next to Veterans Avenue, where one or more of the kidnappers was probably already in place. Another call came in, probably coordinated with the Khourys' arrival because the kidnappers would in this instance want to be in position to watch the Khourys walk away from the money.

Once they did, once they were out of the way, once it was quite clear no one had hung back to watch the car, then Ray and his friend or friends grabbed the money and took off.

No.

At least one of them lingered in the area and watched the Khourys look in the car and fail to find Francine. Then a call to the pay phone telling them to go home, that she'd be back there before they were. And then, while the Khourys did in fact return to Colonial Road, the kidnappers returned to home base. Parked the truck, and—

No. No, the truck had stayed in the garage. They hadn't completely disguised it yet, and Francine Khoury's body was probably still in the back. They had used another vehicle to drive out to Veterans Avenue.

The Ford Tempo, stolen for the occasion? That was possible. Or a third car, with the Tempo stolen and

stashed, to be used for one purpose only, the delivery of the remains.

So many possibilities…

One way or another, though, they tricked the Tempo out now with Francine's butchered body. Cut up the corpse, wrapped each segment in plastic, secured each parcel with tape. Broke the lock of the trunk, filled it up like a meat locker, drove in two cars to Colonial Road and around the corner to a parking spot. Parked the Tempo, and whoever drove it joined his buddy in the other car, and they went home.

To $400,000 and the satisfaction of having had their crime go off flawlessly.

Only one thing left to do. A phone call to send Khoury around the corner to the parked Ford. The job's all done, you're flushed with triumph, but you have to rub his nose in it. What a temptation to use your own phone, the one right there on the table. Khoury hadn't called the cops, he hadn't used any backup, he'd parted readily with the money, so how was he ever going to know where this last call was coming from?

What the hell…

But no, wait a minute, you've done everything right so far, you've been strictly professional about this, so why fuck it up now? What's the sense in that?

On the other hand, you don't have to be a fanatic. Up to now you've used a different phone for every call and made sure every phone you used was a minimum of half a dozen blocks from every other phone.

Just in case there was a trace, just in case they staked out one of those phones.

But they didn't. That's clear now, they didn't do anything of the sort, so there's no need now to use more caution than the circumstances require. Use a pay phone, yes, do that much, but use the most convenient one around, the one that was your first choice, that's why you made your own first call from it.

While you're at it, do your laundry. You've been doing bloody work, you got your clothes filthy, so why not throw a load of wash in the machine?

No, hardly that. Not with four hundred large sitting on the kitchen table. You wouldn't wash those clothes. You'd get rid of them and buy new.

I WALKED up and down every street within two blocks of the laundromat, working within the rectangle formed by Fourth and Sixth avenues and Forty-eighth and Fifty-second streets. I don't know that I was hunting for anything in particular, although I probably would have looked twice at blue panel trucks with homemade lettering on their sides. What I most wanted was to get a feel for the neighborhood and see if anything caught my eye.

The neighborhood was economically and ethnically diverse, with scattered houses crumbling from neglect and others being spruced up and converted for single-family occupancy by their new upscale owners.

There were blocks of row houses, some still clad in a crazy quilt of aluminum and asphalt siding, others stripped of this improvement and their bricks repointed. There were blocks, too, of detached frame houses with little patches of lawn. Some of the lawns were used for parking, while some of the houses had driveways and garages. I saw a lot of street life throughout, a lot of mothers with small children, a lot of furiously energetic kids, a lot of men working on their cars or sitting on stoops, drinking from cans in brown paper bags.

By the time I finished tracing the lines of the grid, I didn't know that I'd accomplished anything. But I was reasonably certain I'd walked past the house where it happened.

A LITTLE later I was standing in front of another house where a murder had taken place.

After a visit to the southernmost pay phone at Sixtieth and Fifth, I went over to Fourth Avenue and walked past the D'Agostino's and into Bay Ridge. When I got to Senator Street it struck me that I was only a couple of blocks from where Tommy Tillary had murdered his wife. I wondered if I could find it after all these years, and at first I had trouble, looking for it on the wrong block. Once I realized my mistake I spotted it right away.

It was a little smaller than my memory had it, like the classrooms in your old grammar school, but otherwise it was as I remembered it to be. I stood out in front and looked up at the third-floor attic window.

Tillary had stowed his wife up there, then brought her downstairs and killed her, making it look as though she'd been slain by burglars.

Margaret, that was her name. It had come back to me. Margaret, but Tommy called her Peg.

He killed her for money. That has always struck me as a poor reason to kill, but perhaps I hold money too cheaply, and life too dear. It is, I'll warrant you, a better motive than killing for the fun of it.

I'd met Drew Kaplan in the course of that case. He was Tommy Tillary's lawyer on the first murder charge. Later, after they'd cut him loose and picked him up again for killing his girlfriend, Kaplan encouraged him to get other representation.

The house looked in good shape. I wondered who owned it, and what he knew of its history. If it had changed hands a few times over the years, the present owner might have missed the story. But this was a pretty settled neighborhood. People tended to stay put.

I stood there for a few minutes, thinking about those drinking days.

The people I'd known, the life I'd led.

Long time ago. Or not so long, depending how you counted.

Chapter 16

Kenan said, "I didn't figure you'd do it that way. Take it to a certain point, then wrap it up and hand it to the cops."

I started to explain again that the decision had been very clear-cut for me, that I hadn't seen myself as having much choice. Things had reached a point where the police could pursue whole avenues of investigation far more effectively than I could, and I'd been able to give them most of what I'd uncovered without bringing my client or his dead wife into the picture.

"No, I got all that," he said. "I see why you did what you did. Why not get 'em to do some of the work?

That's what they're for, isn't it? I just wasn't expecting it, that's all. I had us pictured tracking 'em down, then winding it up with a car chase and a shoot-out or some such shit like that. I don't know, maybe I spend too much time in front of the television set."

He looked as though he spent too much time on airplanes, too much time indoors, too much time drinking too much coffee in back rooms and kitchens. He was unshaven, and his hair was shaggy and needed cutting. He'd lost weight and muscle tone since I'd seen him last, and his handsome face was drawn, with dark circles under the dark eyes.

He was wearing light-colored linen slacks and a bronze silk shirt and loafers with no socks, the sort of outfit in which his usual look was one of quiet elegance. But today he looked rumpled and the least bit seedy.

"Say the cops get 'em," he said. "Then what happens?"

"It depends what kind of a case they're able to make. Ideally you'll get a lot of solid physical evidence linking them to one or more of the murders. In the absence of that, you might see one of the criminals testify against the others in return for the opportunity to plead to a lesser charge."

"Rat 'em out, in other words."

"That's right."

"Why let one of 'em cop a plea? The girl's a witness, isn't she?"

"Only to the crime she was a victim of, and that's a lesser charge than murder. Rape and forcible sodomy are class B felonies, calling for an indeterminate sentence of six to twenty-five years. If you can charge them with Murder Two they're looking at a life sentence."

"What about cutting her breast off?"

"All that amounts to is first-degree assault, and that's a lesser charge than rape and sodomy. I think the max on it is fifteen years."

"That seems off to me," he said. "I'd have to say it's worse than murder, what they did to her. One person kills another person, well, maybe he couldn't help it, maybe he had cause. But to hurt a person like that for the fun of it— what kind of people act like that?"

"Sick ones or evil ones, take your pick."

"You know what's making me crazy is thinking what they did to Francey." He was on his feet, pacing, and he crossed the room and looked out the window. With his back to me he said, "I try not to think about it. I try to tell myself they killed her right away, she fought and they hit her to quiet her and hit her too hard and she died. Just like that, wham, gone." He turned around and his shoulders sagged. "What the fuck's the difference? Whatever they put her through, it's over now.

She's done hurting. She's gone, she's ashes. Whatever's not ashes is with God, if that's how it works. Or at peace, or born again into a bird or a flower or who knows what. Or just gone. I don't know how it works, what happens to you after you die. Nobody does."

"No."

"You hear this shit, near-death experiences, going through a tunnel and meeting Jesus or your favorite uncle and seeing a picture of your whole life. Maybe it happens that way. I don't know. Maybe that only works with near-death experiences. Maybe real death is different. Who knows?"

"I don't."

"No, and who fucking cares? We'll worry about it when it happens to us. What's the most they can get for rape? You said twenty-five years?"

"According to the statute, yes."

"And sodomy, you said. What's that amount to legally, anal?"

"Anal or oral."

He frowned. "I gotta stop this. Everything we talk about I immediately translate in terms of Francine and

I can't do that, I just make myself nuts. You can get twenty-five years for fucking a woman in the ass and a max of fifteen for hacking her tits off. There's something wrong there."

"It'll be tough changing the law."

"No, I'm just looking for a way to make it the system's fault, that's all. Twenty-five years isn't enough, anyway. Life's not enough. They're animals, they should be fucking dead."

"The law can't do that."

"No," he said. "That's all right. All the law has to do is find them.

After that anything can happen. If they go to prison, well, it's not that hard to get at somebody in prison. There's a lot of guys in the joint don't mind turning a buck. Or say they beat it in court or they make bail awaiting trial, they're out in the open and easy to get at." He shook his head. "Listen to me, will you? Like I'm the Godfather sitting back and ordering hits. Who knows what's gonna happen? Maybe I'll lose some of this heat by then, maybe twenty-five years in a cell's gonna sound like enough by then. Who knows?"

I said, "We could get lucky and find them before the police do."

"How? By walking around Sunset Park not knowing who you're looking for?"

"And by using some of what the police come up with. One thing they'll do is send everything they have to the FBI office that draws up profiles of serial killers. Maybe our witness will fill in some of the holes in her memory and I'll have a picture to work with, or at least a decent physical description."

"So you want to stay with it."

"Definitely."

He considered this, nodded. "Tell me again what I owe you."

"I gave the girl a thousand. The lawyer's not charging her anything.

The computer technicians who tapped the phone-company records got fifteen hundred, and the room we used cost a hundred and sixty, plus fifty dollars' deposit on the phone, which I didn't try to recover. Call it twenty-seven hundred even."

"Uh-huh."

"I've had other expenses, but it seemed reasonable to pay them out of my end. These were unusual expenses, and I didn't want to delay action until I could get your okay. If anything seems out of line, I'm prepared to discuss it."

"What's there to discuss?"

"I get the feeling something's bothering you."

He sighed heavily. "You do, huh? The first conversation we had when I got in the other day, seems to me you said something about asking my brother."

"That's right. He didn't have it, so I raised it myself. Why?"

"He didn't have it or he said wait until you got an okay from me?"

"He didn't have it. In fact he specifically said he was sure you would cover the expense, but that he didn't have any cash to speak of."

"You're sure about that?"

"Absolutely. Why? What's the problem?"

"He didn't say he could let you have some of my dough? Nothing like that?"

"No. As a matter of fact—"

"Yeah? As a matter of fact what?"

"He said you undoubtedly had money around the house, but that he didn't have access to that. He said something ironic to the effect that you wouldn't give a junkie the combination to your safe, not even if he was your brother."

"He said that, huh?"

"I don't know that he meant you personally," I said. "The sense of it was that nobody in his right mind would give that information to a drug addict because he couldn't be trusted."

"So he was speaking generally."

"That's how it seemed to me."

"It could have been personal," he said. "And he would have been correct. I wouldn't trust him with that kind of money. My big brother, I'd probably trust him with my life, but cash running into six figures? No, I wouldn't do it."

I didn't say anything.

He said, "I talked to Petey the other day. He was supposed to come out here. He never showed."

"Oh."

"Something else. Day I left he ran me out to the airport. I gave him five thousand dollars. Case he's got any emergencies. So when you asked him for twenty-seven hundred—"

"Less than that. I spoke to him Saturday afternoon and that was before I needed the thousand for the Cassidy girl. I don't know what figure I mentioned. Fifteen hundred or two thousand, most likely."

He shook his head. "Can you make sense out of this? Because I can't. You call him Saturday and he says I'm not coming back until Monday, but go ahead and lay out the money and you'll get it back from me. That's what he says?"

"Yes."

"Now why would he do that? I can see him not wanting to part with any of my dough if he thinks I might be opposed to it. And rather than turn you down and look like a hard case he'll just say he doesn't have it to give. But he's essentially okaying the expense at the same time that he's hanging on to the dough. Am I right?"

"Yes."

"Did you give the impression that you had plenty of cash?"

"No."

"Because I could see him figuring if you got it then you can lay it out. But otherwise… Matt, I don't like to say it but I got a bad feeling about this."

"So do I."

"I think he's using."

"It sounds like it."

"He's keeping his distance, he says he'll be over and he doesn't show up, I call him and he's not there.

What does that sound like?"

"I haven't seen him at a meeting in a week and a half. Now we don't always go to the same meetings but—"

"But you expect to run into him now and then."

"Yes."

"I give him five grand in case something comes up, and the minute something comes up he says he doesn't have it. What did he spend it on?

Or if he's lying, what's he saving it for? Two questions and one answer, way it looks to me. Jay-You-En-Kay. What else?"

"There could be another explanation."

"I'm willing to hear it." He picked up a phone, dialed a number, and stood there holding himself in check while the phone rang. It must have rung ten times before he gave up. "No answer, but it means nothing.

When he used to hole up with a bottle he would go days without answering his phone. I asked him once why he didn't at least take it off the hook. Then I'd know he was there, he said. He's a devious bastard, my brother."

"It's the disease."

"The habit, you mean."

"We generally call it a disease. I guess it amounts to the same thing."

"He kicked junk, you know. He was hooked bad and he quit it, but then he got into the booze."

"So he said."

"How long was he sober? Over a year."

"A year and a half."

"You'd think if you could do it that long you could do it forever."

"A day is the most anybody can do it."

"Yeah," he said impatiently. "A day at a time. I know all that, I heard all the slogans. When he was first getting sober Petey was here all the time. Francey and I would sit with him and give him coffee and listen to him run off at the mouth. Everything he heard at a meeting he came back and filled our ears with it, but we didn't mind because he was starting to put his life back together again. Then one day he told me how he couldn't hang out with me so much anymore because it could undercut his sobriety. Now he's somewhere with a bag of dope and a bottle of whiskey and what the hell happened to his sobriety?"

"You don't know that, Kenan."

He turned on me. "What else, for Christ's sake? What's he doing with five grand, buying lottery tickets?

I never should have given him that much money. It's too much temptation. Whatever happens to him, it's my fault."

"No," I said. "If you gave him a cigar box full of heroin and said

'Watch this for me until I get back,' then it'd be your fault. That's more temptation than anybody should have to handle. But he's been clean and dry for a year and a half and he knows how to be responsible for his own sobriety. If the money made

him nervous he could put it in the bank, or ask somebody in the program to hold it for him. Maybe he went out and maybe he didn't, we don't know yet, but whatever he did you didn't make him do it."

"I made it easy."

"It's never hard. I don't know what a bag of dope costs these days, but you can still get a drink for a couple of dollars, and one's all it takes."

"One wouldn't hold you for very long, though. Still, five thousand dollars ought to keep him going for a hell of a run. What can you spend on liquor, twenty dollars a day if you drink it at home? Two, three times that if you buy it over the bar? Heroin's a more expensive proposition, but even so it's hard to put more than a couple hundred dollars a day in your arm, and it'd take him a while to build his habit back up. Even if he makes a pig of himself, it ought to take him a month to shoot up five grand."

"He didn't use a needle."

"He told you that, huh?"

"It's not true?"

He shook his head. "He told people that, and there was a period when all he did was snort, but he was a needle junkie for a while there.

The lie made the habit sound less serious. Plus he was afraid if women knew he used to shoot dope they'd be afraid to go to bed with him. Not that he's been knocking them over like dominoes lately, but you don't want to make it harder on yourself. He figured they'd assume he shared needles and be afraid he was HIV-positive."

"But he didn't share needles?"

"Says he didn't. And he got tested, and he doesn't have the virus."

"What's the matter?"

"Well, I was just thinking. Maybe he did share needles, maybe he never went for the HIV test. He could lie about that, too."

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Do you use a needle? Or do you just snort?"

"I'm not a junkie."

"Peter told me you snort a bag of dope about once a month."

"When was this? On the phone Saturday?"

"A week before. We went to a meeting, then had a meal and hung out together."

"And he told you that, huh?"

"He said he was here at your house a few days before that and you were high. He said he called you on it and you denied it."

He lowered his eyes for a moment, lowered his voice, too, when he spoke. "Yeah, it's true," he said.

"He did call me on it, and I did deny it. I thought he bought it."

"He didn't."

"No, I guess not. It bothered me to lie about it. It didn't bother me that I did up the dope. I wouldn't do it in front of him and I wouldn't have done it just then if I'd known he was coming over, but it don't hurt anybody, least of all me, if I do up a bag of dope once in a blue moon."

"Whatever you say."

"He said once a month? To tell you the truth, I doubt if it's that much. My guess would be seven, eight, ten times a year. It's never been more than that. I shouldn't have lied to him. I should have said, 'Yeah, I been feeling like shit, so I got off, and so what?' Because I can do it a few times a year and it never comes to more than that, and if he has one little taste he's got the whole habit back and they're stealing his shoes when he nods out in the subway. That happened to him, he woke up on the D train in his socks."

"It's happened to a lot of people."

"Including you?"

"No, but it could have."

"You're an alcoholic, right? I had a drink before you came over here. If you asked me I'd say so, I wouldn't lie about it. Why did I lie about it to my brother?"

"He's your brother."

"Yeah, that's part of it. Oh, shit, man. I'm worried about him."

"Nothing you can do at this point."

"No, what am I gonna do, drive through the streets looking for him? We'll go together. You look out one side of the car for the fuckers who killed my wife and I'll look out the other side for my brother. How's that for a plan?" He made a face. "In the meantime I owe you money.

What did we say, twenty-seven hundred?" He had a roll of hundreds in his pocket and counted out twenty-seven of them, which pretty much depleted the roll. He handed the money to me and I found a place to put it. He said, "What now?"

"I'll stay with it," I said. "Some of what I try will depend on where the police investigation leads, but—"

"No," he cut in, "that's not what I mean. What do you do now? You got a date for dinner, you got something doing in the city, what?"

"Oh." I had to think. "I'll probably go back to my room. I've been on my feet all day, I want to take a shower and change my clothes."

"You plan to walk back? Or will you take the subway?"

"Well, I won't walk."

"Suppose I drive you."

"You don't have to do that."

He shrugged. "I have to do something," he said.

IN the car he asked me the location of the famous laundromat and said he wanted to have a look at it.

We drove there and he parked the Buick across the street from it and killed the engine. "So we're on a stakeout," he said. "That's what it's called, right? Or is that only on TV?"

"A stakeout generally goes on for hours," I said. "So I hope we're not on one at the moment."

"No, I just wanted to sit here for a minute. I wonder how many times I drove past this place. It never once occurred to me to stop and make a phone call. Matt, you're sure these guys are the same ones who killed the two women and cut the girl?"

"Yes."

"Because this was for profit and the others were strictly, uh, what's the word? Pleasure? Recreation?"

"I know. But the similarities are too specific and too striking. It has to be the same men."

"Why me?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean why me?"

"Because a drug dealer makes an ideal target, lots of cash and a reason to steer clear of the police. We discussed that before. And one of the men had a thing about drugs. He kept asking Pam if she knew any dealers, if she took drugs. He was evidently obsessed with the subject."

"That's why a drug dealer. That's not why me." He leaned forward, propped his arms on the steering wheel. "Who even knows I'm a dealer?

I haven't been arrested, haven't had my name in the papers. My phone's not tapped and my house isn't bugged. I'm positive my neighbors don't have a clue how I make my money. The DEA investigated me a year and a half ago and they dropped the whole thing because they weren't getting anyplace. The NYPD I don't even think they know I'm alive. You're some degenerate, likes to kill women, wants to get rich knocking off a drug dealer, how do you even know of my existence? That's what I want to know. Why me?"

"I see what you mean."

"I started off thinking I'm the target. You know, that the whole thing begins with someone looking to hurt me and take me off. But that's not true, according to you. It starts with crazies who are getting off on rape and murder. Then they decide to make it pay, and then they decide to go after a drug dealer, and then I'm elected. So I can't get anywhere backtracking people I know professionally, somebody who maybe thinks I screwed him in a transaction and he sees a good way of getting even.

I'm not saying there aren't any crazy people dealing in the product, but—"

"No, I follow you. And you're right. You're the target incidentally.

They're looking for a dope dealer and you're one they know of."

"But how?" He hesitated. "There was a thought I had."

"Let's hear it."

"Well, I don't think it makes much sense. But I gather my brother tells his story at meetings, right? He sits up in front and tells everybody what he did and where it got him. And I assume he mentions how his brother makes his living. Am I right?"

"Well, I knew Pete had a brother who dealt drugs, but I didn't know your name or where you lived. I didn't even know Pete's last name."

"If you asked him he would have told you. And how hard would it be to get the rest? 'I think I know your brother. He live in Bushwick?'

'No, Bay Ridge.' 'Oh, yeah? What street?' I don't know. I guess it's farfetched."

"It seems it to me," I said. "I grant you you'll find all kinds at an AA meeting, and there's nothing to stop a serial killer from walking in the doors. God knows a lot of the famous ones were alcoholic, and always under the influence when they did their killing. But I don't know of any of them that ever got sober in the program."

"But it's possible?"

"I suppose so. Most things are. Still, if our friends live here in Sunset Park and Peter went to Manhattan

meetings—"

"Yeah, you're right. They live a mile and a half from me and I'm trying to have them chase into Manhattan in order to hear about me. Of course when I said what I said I didn't know they were from Brooklyn."

"When you said what?"

He looked at me, the pain stitched into his forehead. "When I told Petey he ought to stop running his mouth about my business at his meetings. When I said maybe that's how they got onto me, that's how they picked Francine." He turned to look out the window at the laundromat. "It was when he drove me to the airport. It was just a flare-up. He was giving me grief about something, I forget what, and I threw that in his face. He looked for a second as though I just kicked him in the pit of the stomach. Then he said something, you know, indicating it washed right over him, that he wasn't going to take it seriously, he knew I was just spouting out of anger."

He turned the key in the ignition. "Fuck this laundry," he said. "I don't see a lot of people lining up to make phone calls. Let's get out of here, huh?"

"Sure."

And, a block or two farther along: "Suppose he kept mulling it over, brooding on it. Suppose it stayed on his mind. Suppose he wondered if it was true." He darted a glance at me. "You think that's what sent him out looking to cop? 'Cause I'll tell you, if I was Petey, that just might do it."

BACK in Manhattan he said, "I want to go by his place, knock on his door. You want to keep me company?"

The lock wasn't working on the rooming-house door. Kenan drew it open and said, "Great security here. Great place altogether." We entered and climbed two flights of stairs through that flophouse smell of mice and soiled linen. Kenan walked to a door and listened for a moment, knocked on it, called out his brother's name. There was no response. He repeated the process with the same result, tried the door and found it locked.

"I'm afraid what I'll find in there," he said, "and at the same time I'm afraid to walk away."

I found an expired Visa card in my wallet and loided the door with it. Kenan glanced at me with new respect.

The room was empty, and a mess. The bed linen was half on the floor, and clothing was piled in disarray on a wooden chair. I spotted the Big Book and a couple of AA pamphlets on the oak bureau. I didn't see any bottles or drug paraphernalia, but there was a water tumbler on the bedside table and Kenan picked it up and sniffed at it.

"I don't know," he said. "What do you think?"

The glass was dry inside, but I thought I could smell a residue of alcohol. Still, suggestion would account for it. It wouldn't be the first time I'd smelled alcohol when there wasn't any there.

"I don't like poking around his things," Kenan said. "What little he's got, he's entitled to his privacy. I just had this vision of him turning blue with the needle still in his arm, you know what I mean?"

Out on the street he said, "Well, he's got money. He won't have to steal. 'Less he gets into cocaine, that'll take whatever you got, but he never liked coke much. Petey likes the bass notes, likes to get down as deep as you can go."

"I can identify with that."

"Yeah. He runs out of dough, he can always sell Francey's Camry.

He hasn't got the title, but it Blue Books at eight or nine grand, so he can probably find somebody'll give him a few hundred for it without papers.

That's junkie economics, makes perfect sense."

I told him Peter's joke about the difference between a drunk and a junkie. They'd both steal your wallet, but the junkie would help you look for it.

"Yeah," he said, nodding. "Says it all."

Chapter 17

Several things happened over the course of the next week or so.

I made three trips to Sunset Park, two of them alone, the third in the company of TJ. At loose ends one afternoon, I beeped him and got a call back almost immediately. We met in the Times Square subway station and rode out to Brooklyn together. We had lunch at a deli and café con leche at the Cuban place and walked around some. We talked a lot, and while I didn't learn a great deal about him, he learned a few things about me, assuming he was listening.

While we waited for our train back to the city he said, "Say, you don't have to pay me nothin' for today.

On account of we didn't do nothin'."

"Your time has to be worth something."

"If I be workin', but all I was doin' was hangin' around. Man, I been doin' that for free all my life."

Another night I was just about to leave the house and head for a meeting when a call from Danny Boy sent me chasing out to an Italian restaurant in Corona, where three small-time louts had recently blossomed as big spenders. It seemed unlikely— Corona is in northern Queens, and light-years from Sunset Park— but I went anyway and drank San Pellegrino water at the bar and waited for three guys in silk suits to come in and throw their money around.

The TV was on, and at ten o'clock the Channel 5 newscast included a shot of three men who'd just been arrested for the recent robbing and pistol-whipping of a Forty-seventh Street diamond merchant. The bartender said, "Hey, would you look at that! Those assholes were in here the past three nights, spending money like they couldn't get rid of it fast enough. I had a kind of a feeling where it came from."

"They made it the old-fashioned way," the man next to me said.

"They stole it."

I was only a few blocks from Shea Stadium, but that still left me hundreds of miles from the Mets, who had lost a close one to the Cubs that afternoon at Wrigley. The Yankees were at home against the Indians. I walked to the subway and went home.

ANOTHER time I got a call from Drew Kaplan, who said that Kelly and his colleagues at Brooklyn Homicide wanted Pam to go down to Washington and pay a call at the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico. I asked when she was going.

"She's not," he said.

"She refused?"

"At her attorney's suggestion."

"I don't know about that," I said. "The public-relations department was always where the Feebies were strongest, but what I've heard about their division that profiles serial killers is fairly impressive. I think she should go."

"Well," he said, "it's too bad you're not her lawyer. It's her interests I've been engaged to protect, my friend. Anyway, the mountain's coming to Mohammed. They're sending a guy up tomorrow."

"Let me know how it goes," I said, "insofar as that coincides with what you deem to be the best interests of your client."

He laughed. "Don't get hinky, Matt. Why should she have to schlep down to DC? Let him come here."

After the meeting with the profiler he called again to say he was not blown away by the session. "He seemed a little nonchalant to me,"

Drew said. "Like someone who's only killed two women and slashed a third isn't worth his time. I gather the more of a string a killer puts together, the more it gives them to

work with."

"That figures."

"Yeah, but it's small consolation to the people at the end of the string. They'd probably just as soon the cops caught the guy early on instead of letting him provide such interesting items for their data base.

He was telling Kelly they've put together a really solid profile of some yutz out on the West Coast. They could tell you he collected stamps as a boy and how old he was when he got his first tattoo. But they still haven't apprehended the son of a bitch and I think he said the current count is forty-two, with four more probables."

"I can see why Ray and his friend seem small-time."

"He wasn't wild about the frequency, either. He said serial killers generally manifest a higher level of activity. That means they don't wait months between crimes. He said either they hadn't hit their stride yet or they were infrequent visitors to New York and did the bulk of their killing elsewhere."

"No," I said. "They know the city too well for that."

"Why do you say that?"

"Huh?"

"How do you know how well they knew the city?"

Because they had sent the Khourys chasing all over Brooklyn, but I couldn't mention that. "They used two different outer-borough cemeteries for dumping grounds," I said, "and Forest Park. Who did you ever hear of from out of town who could pick up a girl on Lexington Avenue and wind up in a cemetery in Queens?"

"Anybody could," he said, "if he picked up the wrong girl. Let me think what else he said. He said they

were probably in their early thirties, probably abused as children.

He came up with a lot of very general stuff. There was one other thing he said that gave me a chill."

"What's that?"

"Well, this particular guy's been with the division twenty years, just about since they started it up. He's coming up on retirement pretty soon and he said he's just as glad."

"Because he's burned out?"

"More than that. He said the rate at which these incidents are occurring has been increasing all along in a really nasty way. But the way the curve's shaping up now, they think these cases are really going to spike between now and the end of the century. Sport-killing, he called it. Says they're looking for it to be the leisure craze of the nineties."

THEY didn't do this when I first came around, but these days at AA meetings they generally invite newcomers with less than ninety days of sobriety to introduce themselves and give their day count. At most meetings each of these announcements gets a round of applause. Not at St. Paul's, though, because of a former member who came every night for two months and said before each meeting, "My name is Kevin and I'm an alcoholic and I've got one day back. I drank last night but I'm sober today!" People got sick of applauding this statement, and at the next business meeting we voted, after much debate, to drop the applause altogether. "My name is Al," someone will say, "and I've got eleven days." "Hi, Al," we say.

It was a Wednesday when I walked from Brooklyn Heights clear out to Bay Ridge and collected my expense money from Kenan Khoury, and it was the following Tuesday at the eight-thirty meeting when a familiar voice at the back of the room said, "My name is Peter and I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict and I've got two days back."

"Hi, Peter," everybody said.

I had planned to catch up with him during the break but I got caught up in a conversation with the woman sitting next to me, and when I turned to look for him he was gone. I called him from the hotel afterward but he didn't answer. I called his brother's house.

"Peter's sober," I said. "At least he was an hour ago. I saw him at a meeting."

"I spoke to him earlier today. He said he had most of my money left and nothing bad happened to the car. I told him I didn't give a shit about the money or the car, I cared about him, and he said he was all right. How'd he look to you?"

"I didn't see him. I just heard him speak up, and when I went to look for him he was gone. I just called to let you know he was alive."

He said he appreciated it. Two nights later Kenan called and said he was downstairs in the lobby. "I'm double-parked out front," he said.

"You had dinner yet? C'mon downstairs, meet me outside."

In the car he said, "You know Manhattan better than I do. Where do you want to go? Pick a place."

We went to Paris Green on Ninth Avenue. Bryce greeted me by name and gave us a window table, and Gary waved theatrically from the bar. Kenan ordered a glass of wine and I asked for a Perrier.

"Nice place," he said.

After we'd ordered dinner he said, "I don't know, man. I got no reason to be in the city. I just got in the car and drove around and I couldn't think of a single place to go. I used to do that all the time, just drive around, do my part for the oil shortage and the air pollution. You ever do that? Oh, how could you, you don't have a car. Suppose you want to get away for a weekend? What do you do?"

"Rent one."

"Yeah, sure," he said. "I didn't think of that. You do that much?"

"Fairly often when the weather's decent. My girlfriend and I go upstate, or over to Pennsylvania."

"Oh, you got a girlfriend, huh? I was wondering. Two of you been keeping company for a long time?"

"Not too long."

"What's she do, if you don't mind my asking."

"She's an art historian."

"Very good," he said. "Must be interesting."

"She seems to find it interesting."

"I mean she must be interesting. An interesting person."

"Very," I said.

He was looking better this evening, his hair barbered and his face shaved, but there was still an air of weariness about him, with a current of restlessness moving beneath it.

He said, "I don't know what to do with myself. I sit around the house and it just makes me nuts. My wife's dead, my brother's doing God knows what, my business is going to hell, and I don't know what to do."

"What's the matter with your business?"

"Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I set up something on this trip I just made. I got a shipment due sometime next week."

"Maybe you shouldn't tell me about it."

"You ever have opiated hash? If you were strictly a boozer you probably didn't."

"No."

"That's what I got coming in. Grown in eastern Turkey and coming our way via Cyprus, or so they tell me."

"What's the problem?"

"The problem is I should have walked away from the deal. There are people in it I got no reason to trust, and I went in on it for the worst possible reason. I did it to have something to do."

I said, "I can work for you in the matter of your wife's death. I can do that irrespective of how you make your living, and I can even break a few laws on your behalf. But I can't work for you or with you as far as your profession is concerned."

"Petey told me that working for me would lead him back to using.

Is that a factor for you?"

"No."

"It's just something you wouldn't touch."

"I guess so, yes."

He thought for a moment, then nodded. "I can appreciate that," he said. "I can respect it. On the one hand, I'd like to have you with me because I'd be confident with you backing my play. And it's very lucrative. You know that."

"Of course."

"But it's dirty, isn't it? I'm aware of it. How could I not be? It's a dirty business."

"So get out of it."

"I'm thinking about it. I never figured to make it my life's work. I always figured another couple of years, a few more deals, a little more money in the offshore account. Familiar story, right? I wish they'd just legalize it, make it simple for everybody."

"A cop said the same thing just the other day."

"Never happen. Or maybe it will. I'll tell you, I'd welcome it."

"Then what would you do?"

"Sell something else." He laughed. "Guy I met this past trip, Lebanese like me, I hung out with him and his wife in Paris. 'Kenan,' he says, 'you got to get out of this business, it deadens your soul.' He wants me to throw in with him. You know what he does? He's an arms dealer, for Christ's sake, he sells weapons.

'Man,' I said, 'my customers just kill themselves with the product.

Your customers kill other people.' 'Not the same,' he insisted. 'I deal with nice people, respectable people.' And he tells me all these important people he knows, CIA, secret services of other countries. So maybe I'll get out of the dope business and become a big-time merchant of death.

You like that better?"

"Is that your only choice?"

"Serious? No, of course not. I could buy and sell anything. I don't know, my old man may have been

slightly full of shit with the Phoenician business, but there's no question our people are traders all over the world. When I dropped out of college, first thing I did was travel. I went visiting relatives. The Lebanese are scattered all over the planet, man. I got an aunt and uncle in Yucatán, I got cousins all through Central and South America. I went over to Africa, some relatives on my mother's side are in a country called Togo. I never heard of it until I went there. My relatives operate the black market for currency in Lomé, that's the capital of Togo.

They've got this suite of offices in a building in downtown Lomé. No sign in the lobby and you got to walk up a flight of stairs, but it's pretty much out in the open. All day long people are coming in with money to change, dollars, pounds, francs, traveler's checks. Gold, they buy and sell gold, weigh it and figure the price.

"All day long the money goes back and forth over the long table they got there. I couldn't believe how much money they handled. I was a kid, I never saw a lot of cash, and I'm looking at tons of money. See, they only make like one or two percent on a transaction, but the volume is enormous.

"They lived in this walled compound on the edge of town. It had to be huge to accommodate all the servants. I'm a kid from Bergen Street, I grew up sharing a room with my brother, and here are these cousins of mine and they've got something like five servants for each member of the family. That's including children. No exaggeration. I was uncomfortable at first, I thought it was wasteful, but it was explained to me. If you were rich you had an obligation to employ a lot of people.

You were creating jobs, you were doing something for the people.

" 'Stay,' they told me. They wanted to take me into the business. If I didn't like Togo, they had in-laws with the same kind of operation in Mali. 'But Togo's nicer,' they said."

"Could you still go?"

"That's the sort of thing you do when you're twenty years old, start a new life in a new country."

"What are you, thirty-two?"

"Thirty-three. That's a little old for an entry-level slot."

"You might not have to start in the mailroom."

He shrugged. "Funny thing is Francine and I discussed it. She had a problem with it because she was afraid of blacks. The idea of being one of a handful of white people in a black nation was frightening to her.

She said, like, suppose they decide to take over? I said, honey, what's to take over? It's their country. They already own it. But she was not completely rational on the subject." His voice hardened.

"And look who she got in a truck with, look who killed her. White guys. All your life you fear one thing and something else sneaks up on you." His eyes locked with mine. "It's like they didn't just kill her, they obliterated her. She ceased to exist. I didn't even see a body, I saw parts, chunks. I went to my cousin's clinic in the middle of the night and turned the chunks into ashes. She's gone and there's this hole in my life and I don't know what to put in it."

"They say time takes time," I said.

"It can take some of mine. I got time I don't know what to do with.

I'm alone in the house all day and I find myself talking to myself. Out loud, I mean."

"People do that when they're used to having somebody around.

You'll get over it."

"Well, if I don't, so what? If I'm talking to myself who's gonna hear me, right?" He sipped from his water glass. "Then there's sex," he said.

"I don't know what the hell to do about sex. I have the desire, you know?

I'm a young guy, it's natural."

"A minute ago you were too old to start a new life in Africa."

"You know what I mean. I have desires and I not only don't know what to do about them, I don't feel right about having them. It feels disloyal to want to go to bed with a woman whether I actually do it or not. And who would I go to bed with if I wanted to? What am I gonna do, sweet-talk some woman in a bar? Go to a massage parlor, pay some cross-eyed Korean girl to get me off? Go out on fucking dates, take some woman to a movie, make conversation with her? I try to picture myself doing that and I figure I'd rather stay home and jerk off, only I won't do that either because even that seems like it would be disloyal."

He sat back abruptly, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to spout all this crap at you. I hadn't planned on saying any of that. I don't know where it came from."

I CALLED my art historian when I got back to the hotel. She'd had her class that night and wasn't back yet. I left a message on her machine and wondered if she would call.

We'd had a bad time of it a few nights before. After dinner we'd rented a movie that she wanted to see and I didn't, and maybe I was bitter about that, I don't know. Whatever it was, there was something wrong between us. After the movie ended she made an off-color remark and I suggested she might make an effort to sound a little less like a whore. That would have been an acceptable rejoinder under ordinary circumstances, but I said it like I meant it and she said something suitably stinging in return.

I apologized and so did she and we agreed it was nothing, but it didn't feel that way, and when it got to be time to go to bed we did so on opposite sides of town. When we spoke the next day we didn't say anything about it, and we still hadn't, and it hung in the air between us whenever we talked, and even when we didn't.

She called me back around eleven-thirty. "I just got in," she said.

"A couple of us went out for a drink after class. How was your day?"

"All right," I said, and we talked about it for a few minutes. Then I asked if it was too late for me to drop over.

"Oh, gee," she said. "I'd like to see you, too."

"But it's too late."

"I think so, hon. I'm wiped out and I just want to take a quick shower and pass out. Is that okay?"

"Sure."

"Talk to you tomorrow?"

"Uh-huh. Sleep well."

I hung up and said, "I love you," speaking to the empty room, hearing the words bounce off the walls.

We had become quite adept at purging the phrase from our speech when we were together, and I listened to myself saying it now and wondered if it was true.

I felt something but couldn't work out what it was. I took a shower and got out and dried off, and standing there looking at my face in the mirror over the bathroom sink I realized what it was I felt.

There are two midnight meetings every night. The closest one was on West Forty-sixth Street and I got there just as they were beginning the meeting. I helped myself to a cup of coffee and sat down, and minutes later I was hearing a voice I recognized say, "My name is Peter and I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict." Good, I thought. "And I have one day back," he said.

Not so good. Tuesday he'd had two days, today he had one. I thought about how difficult it must be, trying to get back in the lifeboat and not being able to get a grip on it. And then I stopped thinking about Peter Khoury because I was there for my own benefit, not for his.

I listened intently to the qualification, although I couldn't tell you what I heard, and when the speaker finished up and opened the meeting I got my hand up right away. I got called on and said, "My name's Matt and I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober a couple of years and I've come a long way since I walked in the door and sometimes I forget that I'm still pretty fucked up. I'm going through a difficult phase in my relationship and I didn't even realize it until a little while ago. Before I came over here I felt uncomfortable and I had to stand under a shower for five minutes to dope out what it was I felt. And then I saw that it was fear, that I was afraid.

"I don't even know what I'm afraid of. I have a feeling if I let myself go I'll find out I'm afraid of every goddamned thing in the world.

I'm afraid to be in a relationship and I'm afraid to be out of it. I'm afraid I'll wake up one of these days and look in the mirror and see an old man staring back at me. That I'll die alone in that room some day and nobody'll find me until the smell starts coming through the walls.

"So I got dressed and came over here because I don't want to drink and I don't want to feel like this, and after all these years I still don't know why it helps to run off at the mouth like this, but it does. Thank you."

I figured I probably sounded like an emotional basket case, but you learn not to give a rat's ass what you sound like, and I didn't. It was particularly easy to spew it all in that room because I didn't know anybody there other than Peter Khoury, and if he only had a day he probably couldn't track complete sentences yet, let alone remember them five minutes later.

And maybe I didn't sound that bad after all. At the end we stood and said the Serenity Prayer, and afterward a man two rows in front of me came up to me and asked for my phone number. I gave him one of my cards. "I'm out a lot," I said, "but you can leave a message."

We chatted for a minute, and then I went looking for Peter Khoury, but he was gone. I didn't know if he'd left before the meeting ended or ducked out immediately after, but either way he was gone.

I had a hunch he didn't want to see me, and I could understand that.

I remembered the difficulties I'd had at the beginning, putting a few days together, then drinking, then starting all over again. He had the added disadvantage of having been sober for a stretch, and the humiliation of having lost what he'd had. With all of that going for him, it would probably take a while before he could work his way up to low self-esteem.

In the meantime he was sober. He only had a day, but in a sense that's all you've ever got.

* * *

SATURDAY afternoon I took a break from TV sports and called a telephone operator. I told her I'd lost the card telling me how to engage and disengage Call Forwarding. I envisioned her checking the records, determining that I'd never signed up for the service, and calling 911 to order the hotel ringed by squad cars. "Put that phone down, Scudder, and come out with your hands up!"

Before I could even finish the thought she had cued a recording, and a computer-generated voice was explaining what I had to do. I couldn't write it all down as fast as it came at me, so I had to call a second time and repeat the procedure.

Just before I left the house to go over to Elaine's, I followed the directions, arranging things so that any calls to my phone would be automatically transferred to her line. Or at least that was the theory. I didn't have a great deal of faith in the process.

She'd bought tickets to a play at the Manhattan Theatre Club, a murky and moody play by a Yugoslavian playwright. I had the feeling that some of it was lost in translation, but what came over the footlights still retained a lot of brooding intensity. It took me through dark passages in the self without troubling to turn the lights on.

The experience was even more of an ordeal than it might otherwise have been because they staged it without an intermission. That got us out of there by a quarter of ten, which was not a moment too soon, but it put us through the wringer in the process. The actors took their curtain calls, the house lights came up, and we shuffled out of there like zombies.

"Strong medicine," I said.

"Or strong poison. I'm sorry, I've been picking a lot of winners lately, haven't I? That movie that you hated and now this."

"I didn't hate this," I said. "I just feel as though I went ten rounds with it, and I got hit in the face a lot."

"What do you figure the message was?"

"It probably comes through best in Serbo-Croatian. The message? I don't know. That the world's a rotten place, I guess."

"You don't need to go to a play for that," she said. "You can just read the paper."

"Ah," I said. "Maybe it's different in Yugoslavia."

We had dinner near the theater, and the mood of the play cloaked us. Halfway through I said, "I want to say something. I want to apologize for the other night."

"That's over, honey."

"I don't know if it is. I've been in a strange mood lately. Some of it has to be this case. We had a couple breaks, I felt as though I was making progress, and now everything's stuck again and I feel stuck myself.

But I don't want it to affect us. You're important to me, our relationship is important to me."

"To me, too."

We talked a little and things seemed to lighten up, although the play's mood was not easily set aside.

Then we went back to her place and she checked her messages while I used the bathroom. When I came out she had a curious expression on her face.

She said, "Who's Walter?"

"Walter."

"Just calling to say hello, nothing important, wanted to let you know he was alive, and he'll probably give you a call later."

"Oh," I said. "Fellow I met at a meeting the night before last. He's fairly newly sober."

"And you gave him this number?"

"No," I said. "Why would I do that?"

"That's what I was wondering."

"Oh," I said, as it dawned on me. "Well, I guess it works."

"You guess what works?"

"Call Forwarding. I told you the Kongs gave me Call Forwarding when they were playing games with the phone company. I put it on this afternoon."

"So your calls would come here."

"That's right. I didn't have a lot of faith that it would work, but evidently it does. What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course. Do you want to hear the message? I can play it back again."

"Not if that's all it said."

"It's all right to erase it, then?"

"Go ahead."

She did, then said, "I wonder what he thought when he dialed your number and there was an answering machine with a woman's voice."

"Well, he evidently didn't think he had the wrong number, or he wouldn't have left a message."

"I wonder who he thinks I am."

"A mysterious woman with a sexy voice."

"He probably thinks we're living together. Unless he knows you live alone."

"All he knows about me is I'm sober and crazy."

"Why crazy?"

"Because I was dumping a lot of garbage at the meeting I met him at. For all he knows I'm a priest and you're the housekeeper at the rectory."

"That's a game we haven't tried. Priest and housekeeper. 'Bless me, Father, for I have been a very naughty girl and I probably need a good spanking.' "

"I wouldn't be surprised."

She grinned, and I reached for her, and the phone picked that moment to ring. "You answer it," she said.

"It's probably Walter."

I picked up the phone and a man with a deep voice asked to speak to Miss Mardell. I handed her the receiver without a word and walked into the other room. I stood at the window and looked at the lights on the other side of the East River. After a couple of minutes she came and stood beside me. She didn't allude to the call, nor did I. Then ten minutes later the phone rang again and she answered it and it was for me. It was Walter, just using the phone a lot the way they encourage newcomers to do. I didn't stay on with him long, and when I got off I said, "I'm sorry. It was a bad idea."

"Well, you're here a lot. People ought to be able to reach you." A few minutes later she said, "Take it off the hook. Nobody has to reach either of us tonight."

IN the morning I dropped in on Joe Durkin and wound up going out for lunch with him and two friends of his from the Major Crimes Squad. I went back to my hotel and stopped at the desk for my messages, but there weren't any. I went upstairs and picked up a book, and at twenty after three the phone rang.

Elaine said, "You forgot to take off Call Forwarding."

"Oh, for Christ's sake," I said. "No wonder there weren't any messages. I just got home, I was out all morning, it slipped my mind completely. I was going to come straight home and fix it and I forgot. It must have been driving you crazy all day."

"No, but—"

"But how did you get through? Wouldn't it just bounce your call back and give you a busy signal if you called here?"

"It did the first time I tried. I called the desk downstairs and they patched the call through."

"Oh."

"Evidently it doesn't forward calls through the switchboard downstairs."

"Evidently not."

"TJ called earlier. But that's not important. Matt, Kenan Khoury just called. You have to call him right away. He said it's really urgent."

"He did?"

"He said life or death, and probably death. I don't know what that means, but he sounded serious."

I called right away, and Kenan said, "Matt, thank God. Don't go nowhere, I got my brother on the other line. You're at home, right?

Okay, stay on the line, I'll be with you in a second." There was a click, and then a minute or so later there was another click and he was back.

"He's on his way," he said. "He's coming over to your hotel, he'll be right out in front."

"What's the matter with him?"

"With Petey? Nothing, he's fine. He's gonna bring you out to Brighton Beach. Nobody's got time to dick around with the subway today."

"What's in Brighton Beach?"

"A whole lot of Russians," he said. "How do I put this? One of 'em just called to say he's going through business difficulties similar to what I went through."

That could only mean one thing, but I wanted to make sure.

"His wife?"

"Worse. I gotta go, I'll meet you there."

Chapter 18

Late in September Elaine and I had spent an idyllic afternoon in Brighton Beach. We rode the Q train to the end of the line and walked along Brighton Beach Avenue, browsing in the produce markets, window-shopping, then exploring the side streets with their modest frame houses and a network of back streets, little walks and alleys and paths and ways. The bulk of the population consisted of Russian Jews, many of them very recent arrivals, and the neighborhood had felt extremely foreign while remaining quintessentially New York. We ate at a Georgian restaurant, then walked on the boardwalk clear to Coney Island, watching people hardier than ourselves bobbing in the ocean.