A Walk Among the Tombstones

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."