A Walk Among the Tombstones

"No, it's not. What I want is the calls made to Khoury's phone, but that's not how they log them, because there's no point. They've got the technology to tell you what number's calling you before you even pick up the phone. They can mount a little LED gadget on your phone that'll display the number of the calling party and you can decide whether or not you want to talk."

"That's not available yet, is it?"

"No, not in New York, and it's controversial. It would probably cut down on the nuisance calls and put a lot of telephone perverts out of business, but the police are afraid it'd keep a lot of people from phoning in anonymous tips, because they'd suddenly be a lot less anonymous."

"If it were available now, and if Khoury had had it on his phone-"

"Then we'd know what phones the kidnappers called from. They probably used pay phones, they've been professional enough in other respects, but at least we'd know which pay phones."

"Is that important?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "I don't know what's important. But it doesn't matter because I can't get the information. It seems to me that if the calls are logged somewhere in the computer there ought to be some way to sort them by the called number, but everyone I talked to said it was impossible. That's not the way they're stored, so they can't be accessed that way."

"I don't know anything about computers."

"Neither do I, and it's a pain in the ass. I try to talk to people and I don't understand half the words they use."

"I know what you mean," she said. "That's how I feel when we watch football."

I STAYED over that night, and in the morning I used up some of her message units while she was at the gym. I called a lot of police officers and I told a lot of lies.

Mostly I claimed to be a journalist doing a roundup piece on criminal abductions for a true-crime magazine. I got a lot of cops who had nothing to say or were too busy to talk to me, and I got a fair number who were happy to cooperate but wanted to talk about cases that were years old or ones in which the criminals had been spectacularly stupid, or had been caught through some particularly clever police work. What I wanted- well, that was the problem, I didn't really know what I wanted. I was fishing.

Ideally, I would have loved to hook a live one, somebody who had been abducted and survived. It was conceivable that they had worked their way up to murder, that there had been earlier exploits, joint or individual, in which the victim had been released alive. It was also possible that a victim could have somehow escaped. There was a world of difference, though, between postulating the existence of such a woman and finding her.

My pose as a free-lance crime reporter wouldn't do me any good in my search for a live witness. The system is pretty good about shielding rape victims- at least until they get to court, where the defendant's attorney gets to violate them all over again in front of God and everybody. Nobody was going to give out the names of rape victims over the phone.

So my pitch changed for the sex-crimes units. I became a private investigator again, Matthew Scudder, retained by a film producer who was making a TV movie of the week about abduction and rape. The actress selected for the lead- I wasn't authorized to disclose her name at the present time- wanted an opportunity to research the role in depth, specifically by meeting one-on-one with women who had themselves been through this ordeal. She wanted, essentially, to learn as much as she could about the experience short of undergoing it herself, and the women who assisted her would be compensated as technical advisers and could be listed as such in the credits or not, as they preferred.

Naturally I didn't want names or numbers, and had no intention of attempting to initiate contact myself. My thought was that perhaps someone from the unit, possibly a woman who had done victim counseling, could make contact with whatever victims struck her as likely prospects. The woman in our scenario, I explained, was abducted by a pair of sadistic rapists who forced her into a truck, brutalized her, and threatened her with grievous physical harm, threatened specifically to maim her. Obviously someone whose experience was in any way parallel to our fictional narrative would be just what we were looking for. If such a woman was interested in helping us out, and perhaps in helping in some small way other women who might be exposed to such treatment in the future, or who had already gone through it, and might find it a cathartic, even a therapeutic, experience to coach a Hollywood actress in what could be a showcase role-

The whole thing played surprisingly well. Even in New York, where you're always coming upon film crews shooting location sequences on the street, the mere mention of the movie business tends to turn people's heads. "Just have anyone who's interested give me a call," I wound up, leaving my name and number. "They don't have to give their names. They can remain anonymous throughout the entire process, if they want."

Elaine walked in just as I was finishing my pitch to a woman in the Manhattan Sex Crimes Unit. When I got off the phone she said, "How are you going to get all of these calls at your hotel? You're never there."

"They'll take messages at the desk."

"From people who don't want to leave a name or number? Look, give them my number. I'm usually here, and if I'm not they'll at least get an answering machine with a woman's voice on it. I'll be your assistant, I can certainly screen the calls and get names and addresses from the ones who are willing to give them. What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing," I said. "Are you sure you want to do it?"

"Sure."

"Well, I'm delighted. That was the Manhattan unit I was just talking to, and I called the Bronx earlier. I was saving Brooklyn and Queens for last, since we know they've operated there. I wanted to work the bugs out of my routine before I called them."

"Is it bug-free now? And I don't want to horn in, but is there any advantage in my making the calls? You sounded low-key and sympathetic as could be, but it seems to me that whenever a man talks about rape there's the undercurrent of suspicion that he's getting off on the whole thing."

"I know."

"I mean, all you have to do is say 'movie of the week' and the subtext a woman gets is that sisterhood is going to be violated yet again in another tacky exploitation drama. Whereas if I say it the subliminal message is that the whole thing's under the sponsorship of NOW."

"You're right. I think it went reasonably well, especially on the Manhattan call, but there was a lot of resistance there."

"You sounded terrific, honey. But can I try?"

We went over the premise first to make sure she had it down, and then I got through to the Sex Crimes Unit at the Queens County DA's office and gave her the phone. She was on the phone for almost ten minutes, at once earnest and polished and professional, and when she rang off I felt like applauding.

"What do you think?" she asked. "A little too sincere?"

"I thought you were perfect."

"Really?"

"Uh-huh. It's almost scary to see what a slick liar you are."

"I know. When I was listening to you I thought, he's so honest, where did he learn to lie like that?"

"I never knew a good cop who wasn't a good liar," I said. "You're playing a part all the time, creating an attitude to fit the person you're dealing with. The same skill's even more important when you work private, because you're constantly asking for information you've got no legal right to. So if I'm good at it, you can say it's part of the job description."

"For me, too," she said. "Now that I come to think of it. I'm always acting, it's what I do."

"That was great acting last night, incidentally."

She gave me a look. "It's tiring, though, isn't it? Lying, I mean."

"You want to quit?"

"Screw that, I'm just getting warmed up. Who else do I do, Brooklyn and Staten Island?"

"Forget Staten Island."

"Why? No sex crimes in Staten Island?"

"All sex is a crime in Staten Island."

"Har har."

"No, they could have a unit, for all I know, although the incidence there is nothing compared to the other boroughs. But I can't see our three men in a van zooming across the Verrazano Bridge bent on rape and mayhem."

"So I've only got one more call to make?"

"Well," I said, "there are also sex-crime units in the various police-department borough commands, and there are frequently rape specialists in individual precincts. You just ask the desk officer to route the call to the appropriate person. I could make a list, but I don't know how much time you've got for this."

She gave me a come-hither look. "If you've got the money, honey," she said archly, "I've got the time."

"As a matter of fact, there's no reason why you shouldn't get paid for this. There's no reason you shouldn't be on Khoury's payroll."

"Oh, please," she said. "Whenever I find something I like somebody tries to get me to take money for it. No, seriously, I don't want to get paid. When this is all but a memory you can take me out for a really extravagant dinner somewhere, okay?"

"Whatever you say."

"And afterward," she said, "you can slip me a hundred for cab fare."

Chapter 8

I stayed around while she charmed the daylights out of a staffer in the Brooklyn DA's Office, then left her with a list of people to call and walked to the library. There was no need for me to supervise her. She was a natural.

In the library I did what I'd started doing the previous morning, working my way through six months' worth of The New York Times on microfilm. I wasn't looking for abductions because I didn't really expect to find any reported as such. Instead I was assuming that they had occasionally snatched someone off the street without anyone witnessing the act, or at least without their reporting it. I was looking for victims who turned up dead in parks or alleys, especially victims who'd been sexually assaulted and mutilated, specifically dismembered.

A problem lay in the fact that touches of that sort weren't very likely to make the papers. It's standard police policy to withhold specific details of mutilation in order to spare themselves a variety of aggravations- phony confessions, copycat offenders, false witnesses. For their part, newspapers tend to spare their readers the more graphic details. By the time the news gets to the reader, it's hard to tell what happened.

Some years ago there was a sex criminal who was killing young boys on the Lower East Side. He lured them onto rooftops, stabbed or strangled them, and amputated and carried off their penises. He was at it long enough for cops on the case to come up with a name for him. They called him Charlie Chopoff.

Naturally enough, the police reporters called him the same thing- but not in print. There was no way any New York newspaper was going to provide that little detail for their readers, and there was no way to use the nickname without the reader having a pretty fair idea as to just what was chopped off. So they didn't call him anything, and reported only that the killer had mutilated or disfigured his victims, which could cover anything from ritual disembowelment to a lousy haircut.

Nowadays they might be less restrained.