"Yes."
"Sit still a minute, I want to show you something." He went into another room and came back with a picture, a five-by-seven color shot in a silver frame. "That's at our wedding," he said. "That's two years ago, not quite two years, be two years in May."
He was in a tuxedo and she was all in white. He was smiling hugely, while she was not smiling, as I think I mentioned earlier. She was beaming, though, and you could see that she was radiant with happiness.
I didn't know what to say.
"I don't know what they did to her," he said. "That's one of the things I won't let myself think about. But they killed her and they butchered her, they made some kind of dirty joke out of her, and I have to do something about it because I'll die if I don't. I'd do it all myself if I could. In fact we tried, me and Petey, but we don't know what to do, we don't have the knowledge, we don't know the moves. The questions you asked before, the approach you took, if nothing else it showed me that this is an area where I don't know what I'm doing. So I want your help and I can pay you whatever I have to, money's not a problem, I've got plenty of money and I'll spend whatever I have to. And if you say no I'll either find someone else or try to do it myself because what the hell else am I gonna do?" He reached across the table and took the picture away from me and looked at it. "Jesus, what a perfect day that was," he said, "and all the days since, and then it all turned to shit." He looked at me. He said, "Yes, I'm a trafficker, a dope dealer, whatever you want to call it, and yes, it's my intention to kill these fucks. So that's all out on the table. What do you say? Are you in or out?"
My best friend, the man I'd planned to join in Ireland, was a career criminal. According to legend, he had one night walked the streets of Hell's Kitchen carrying a bowler's bag from which he displayed the severed head of an enemy. I couldn't swear it happened, but more recently I'd been at his side in a cellar in Maspeth when he severed a man's hand with one blow of a cleaver. I'd had a gun in my hand that night, and I'd used it.
So if I was still very much a cop in some respects, in other ways I had undergone considerable change. I'd long since swallowed the camel; why strain at the gnat?
"I'm in," I said.
Chapter 3
I got back to my hotel a little after nine. I'd had a long session with Kenan Khoury, filling pages of my notebook with names of friends and associates and family members. I'd gone to the garage to inspect the Toyota, and found the Beethoven cassette still in the tape deck. If there were any other clues in Francine's car, I couldn't spot them.
The other car, the gray Tempo used to deliver her segmented remains, was not available for inspection. The kidnappers had parked it illegally, and sometime in the course of the weekend a tow truck from Traffic had showed up to haul it away. I could have attempted to track it down, but what was the point? It had surely been stolen for the occasion, and had probably been previously abandoned, given the condition of it. A police lab crew might have turned up something in the trunk or interior, stains or fibers or markings of some sort, that would point out a profitable line of investigation. But I didn't have the resources for that kind of inspection. I'd be running all over Brooklyn to look at a car that wouldn't tell me a thing.
In the Buick the three of us traced a long, circuitous course, past the D'Agostino's and the Arabian market on Atlantic Avenue, then south to the first pay phone at Ocean and Farragut, then south on Flatbush and east on N to the second booth on Veterans Avenue. I didn't really have to see these sights, there's not a tremendous amount of information you can glean by staring at a public telephone, but I've always found it worthwhile to put in time on the scene, to walk the pavements and climb the stairs and see it all firsthand. It helps make it real.
It also gave me a way to take the Khourys through it again. In a police investigation, witnesses almost always complain about having to relate the same story over and over to a host of different people. It seems pointless to them, but there's a point to it. If you tell it enough times to enough different people, maybe you'll come up with something you've previously left out, or maybe one person will hear something that sailed past everybody else.
Somewhere in the course of things we stopped at the Apollo, a coffee shop on Flatbush. We all ordered the souv-laki. It was good, but Kenan hardly touched his. In the car afterward he said, "I should have ordered eggs or something. Ever since the other night I got no taste for meat. I can't eat it, it turns my stomach. I'm sure I'll get over it, but for the time being I've got to remember to order something else. It makes no sense, ordering something and then you can't bring yourself to eat it."
PETER drove me home in the Camry. He was staying at Colonial Road, he'd been there since the kidnapping, sleeping on the couch in the living room, and he needed to stop by his room to pick up clothes.
Otherwise I'd have called a livery service and taken a taxi. I'm comfortable enough on the subway, I rarely feel unsafe on it, but it seemed a false economy to stint on cab fare with ten thousand dollars in my pocket. I'd have felt pretty silly if I ran into a mugger.
That was my retainer, two banded stacks of hundreds with fifty bills in each, two packets of bills indistinguishable from the eighty packets paid to ransom Francine Khoury. I've always had trouble putting a price on my services, but in this case I'd been spared the decision. Kenan had dropped the two stacks on the table and asked if that was enough to start with. I told him it was on the high side.
"I can afford it," he said. "I've got plenty of money. They didn't tap me out, they didn't come close."
"Could you have paid the million?"
"Not without leaving the country. I've got an account in the Caymans with half a mil in it. I had just under seven hundred large in the safe here. Actually I probably could have raised the other three here in town, if I made a few phone calls. I wonder."
"What?"
"Oh, crazy thinking. Like suppose I paid the mil, would they have returned her alive? Suppose I never pressed on the phone, suppose I was polite, kissed their asses and all."
"They'd have killed her anyway."
"That's what I tell myself, but how do I know? I can't keep myself from wondering if there was something I could have done. Suppose I played hardball all the way, not a penny paid unless they showed me proof she was alive."
"She was probably already dead when they called you."
"I pray you're right," he said, "but I don't know. I keep thinking there must have been some way I could have saved her. I keep figuring it was my fault."
* * *
WE took expressways back to Manhattan, the Shore Parkway and the Gowanus into the tunnel. Traffic was light at that hour but Pete took it slow, rarely pushing the Camry past forty miles an hour. We didn't talk much at first, and the silences tended to stretch.
"It's been some couple of days," he said finally. I asked him how he was holding up. "Oh, I'm all right," he said.
"Have you been getting to meetings?"
"I'm pretty regular." After a moment he said, "I haven't had a chance to get to a meeting since this shit started. I've been, you know, pretty busy."
"You're no good to your brother unless you stay sober."