A Walk Among the Tombstones

It struck me I was hearing a lot about cabs from somebody who was working as a messenger and delivery boy, and then his brother's name rang a bell. I said, "You have more than one brother, Pete?"

"Just the one."

"I think you mentioned him in your qualification, something about his occupation."

A pause. Then, "Matt, I'm just asking you to come out and listen."

"Where are you?"

"Do you know Brooklyn?"

"I'd have to be dead."

"How's that?"

"Nothing, I was just thinking out loud. A famous short story, 'Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.' I used to know parts of the borough reasonably well. Where are you in Brooklyn?"

"Bay Ridge. Colonial Road."

"That's easy."

He gave me the address and I wrote it down.

THE R train, also known as the Broadway local of the BMT, runs all the way from 179th Street in Jamaica to within a few blocks of the Verrazano Bridge at the southwest corner of Brooklyn. I caught it at Fifty-seventh and Seventh and got off two stops from the end of the line.

There are those who hold that once you leave Manhattan you're out of the city. They're wrong, you're just in another part of the city, but there's no question that the difference is palpable. You could spot it with your eyes closed. The energy level is different, the air doesn't hum with the same urgent intensity.

I walked a block on Fourth Avenue, past a Chinese restaurant and a Korean greengrocer and an OTB parlor and a couple of Irish bars, then cut over to Colonial Road and found Kenan Khoury's house. It was one of a group of detached single-family homes, solid square structures that looked to have been built sometime between the wars. A tiny lawn, a half-flight of wooden steps leading to the front entrance. I climbed them and rang the bell.

Pete let me in and led me into the kitchen. He introduced me to his brother, who stood to shake hands, then motioned for me to take a chair. He stayed on his feet, walked over to the stove, then turned to look at me."Appreciate your coming," he said. "You mind a couple of questions, Mr. Scudder? Before we get started?"

"Not at all."

"Something to drink first? Not a drink drink, I know you know Petey from AA, but there's coffee made or I can offer you a soft drink. The coffee's Lebanese style, which is the same general idea as Turkish coffee or Armenian coffee, very thick and strong. Or there's a jar of instant Yuban if you'd rather have that."

"The Lebanese coffee sounds good."

It tasted good, too. I took a sip and he said, "You're a detective, is that right?"

"Unlicensed."

"What's that mean?"

"That I have no official standing. I do per diem work for one of the big agencies occasionally, and on those occasions I'm operating on their license, but otherwise what I do is private and unofficial."

"And you used to be a cop."

"That's right. Some years ago."

"Uh-huh. Uniform or plainclothes or what?"

"I was a detective."

"Had a gold shield, huh?"

"That's right. I was attached to the Sixth Precinct in the Village for several years, and before I was stationed for a little while in Brooklyn. That was the Seventy-eighth Precinct, that's Park Slope and just north of it, the area they're calling Boerum Hill."

"Yeah, I know where it is. I grew up in the Seventy-eighth Precinct. You know Bergen Street? Between Bond and Nevins?"

"Sure."

"That's where we grew up, me and Petey. You'll find a lot of people from the Middle East in that neighborhood, within a few blocks of Court and Atlantic. Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenites, Palestinians. My wife was Palestinian, her folks lived on President Street just off Henry. That's South Brooklyn, but I guess they're calling it Carroll Gardens now. That coffee all right?"

"It's fine."

"You want more, just speak up." He started to say something else, then turned to face his brother. "I don't know, man," he said. "I don't think this is going to work out."

"Tell him the situation, babe."

"I just don't know." He turned to me, spun a chair around, sat down straddling it. "Here's the deal, Matt. Okay to call you that?" I said it was. "Here's the deal. What I need to know is whether I can tell you something without worrying who you're gonna tell it to. I guess what I'm asking is to what extent you're still a cop."

It was a good question, and I'd often pondered it myself. I said, "I was a policeman for a lot of years. I've been a little less of one every year since I left the job. What you're asking is if what you tell me will stay confidential. Legally, I don't have the status of attorney. What you tell me isn't privileged information. At the same time, I'm not an officer of the court, either, so I'm no more obliged than any other private citizen to report matters that come to my attention."

"What's the bottom line?"

"I don't know what the bottom line is. It seems to move around a lot. I can't offer you a lot in the way of reassurance, because I don't know what it is you're thinking about telling me. I came all the way out here because Pete didn't want to say anything over the phone, and now you don't seem to want to say anything here, either. Maybe I should go home."

"Maybe you should," he said.

"Babe-"

"No," he said, getting to his feet. "It was a good idea, man, but it's not working out. We'll find 'em ourselves." He took a roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off a hundred, extending it across the table to me. "For your cabs out and back and for your time, Mr. Scudder. I'm sorry we dragged you all the way out here for nothing." When I didn't take the bill he said, "Maybe your time's worth more than I figured. Here, and no hard feelings, huh?" He added a second bill to the first and I still didn't reach for it.

I pushed back my chair and stood up. "You don't owe me anything," I said. "I don't know what my time's worth. Let's call it an even-up trade for the coffee."

"Take the money. For Christ's sake, the cab had to be twenty-five each way."

"I took the subway."

He stared at me. "You came out here on the subway? Didn't my brother tell you to take a cab? What do you want to save nickels and dimes for, especially when I'm paying for it?"

"Put your money away," I said. "I took the subway because it's simpler and faster. How I get from one place to another is my business, Mr. Khoury, and I run my business the way I want. You don't tell me how to get around town and I won't tell you how to sell crack to schoolchildren, how does that strike you?"

"Jesus," he said.

To Pete I said, "I'm sorry we wasted each other's time. Thanks for thinking of me." He asked me if I wanted to ride back to the city, or at least a lift to the subway stop. "No," I said, "I think I'd like to walk around Bay Ridge a little. I haven't been out here in years. I had a case that brought me to within a few blocks of here, right on Colonial Road but a little ways to the north. Right across from the park. Owl's Head Park, I think it is."

"That's eight, ten blocks from here," Kenan Khoury said.

"That sounds right. The guy who hired me was charged with killing his wife, and the work I did for him helped get the charges dropped."

"And he was innocent?"

"No, he killed her," I said, remembering the whole thing. "I didn't know that. I found out after."

"When there was nothing you could do."

"Sure there was," I said. "Tommy Tillary, that was his name. I forget his wife's name, but his girlfriend was Carolyn Cheatham. When she died, he wound up going away for it."

"He killed her, too?"

"No, she killed herself. I fixed it so it looked like murder, and I fixed it so he would go away for it. I got him out of one scrape that he didn't deserve to get out of, so it seemed fitting to get him into another one."

"How much time did he do?"

"As much as he could. He died in prison. Somebody stuck a knife in him." I sighed. "I thought I'd go walk past his house, see if it brought back any memories, but they seem to have come back all by themselves."

"It bother you?"

"Remembering, you mean? Not particularly. I can think of a lot of things I've done that bother me more." I looked around for my coat, then remembered I hadn't worn one. It was spring outside, sport jacket weather, although it would be going down into the forties in the evening.

I started for the door and he said, "Hold it a minute, will you, Mr. Scudder?"

I looked at him.

"I was out of line," he said. "I apologize."

"You don't have to apologize."

"Yes I do. I flew off the handle. This is nothing. Earlier today I broke a phone, I got a busy signal and I flew into a rage and smashed the receiver against the wall until the housing splintered." He shook his head. "I never get like that. I've been under a strain."

"There's a lot of that going around."

"Yeah, I suppose there is. The other day some guys kidnapped my wife, cut her up in little pieces wrapped in plastic and sent her back to me in the trunk of a car. Maybe that's the same strain everybody else is under. I wouldn't know."

Pete said, "Easy, babe-"

"No, I'm all right," Kenan said. "Matt, sit down a minute. Let me just run the whole thing down for you, top to bottom, and then you decide if you want to walk or not. Forget what I said before. I'm not worried, who you're gonna tell or not tell. I just don't want to say it out loud 'cause it makes it all real, but it's real already, isn't it?"

HE took me through it, giving me the story essentially as I recounted it earlier. There were some details I supplied that came out later in my own investigation, but the Khoury brothers had already unearthed a certain amount of data on their own. Friday they found the Toyota Camry where she'd parked it on Atlantic Avenue, and that had led them to The Arabian Gourmet, while the bags of groceries in the trunk had let them know about her stop at D'Agostino's.

When he was done telling it I declined the offer of another cup of coffee and accepted a glass of club soda. I said, "I have some questions."

"Go ahead."

"What did you do with the body?"

The brothers exchanged glances, and Pete gestured for Kenan to go ahead. He took a breath and said, "I have this cousin, he's a veterinarian, has an animal hospital on- well, it doesn't matter where it is, it's in the old neighborhood. I called him and told him I needed private access to his place of business."

"When was this?"

"This was Friday afternoon that I called him and Friday night that I got the key from him and we went over there. He has a unit, I guess you would call it an oven, that he uses for cremating people's pets that he puts to sleep. We took the, uh, we took the-"

"Easy, babe."

He shook his head, impatient. "I'm all right, I just don't know how to say it. What do you call it? We took the pieces of, of Francine, and we cremated her."

"You unwrapped all of the, uh-"

"No, what for? The tape and plastic burned along with everything else."