Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

  “You told me. Ray.”

  “Ray Callander. I know his old address in Queens. I know the license plate on his Honda.”

  “I thought he had a truck.”

  “He’s got a two-door Civic, too. We’re going to get him, Kenan. Maybe not tonight, but we’re going to get him.”

  “That’s good,” he said slowly. “But I have to tell you something. You know, I got in on this because of what happened to my wife. That’s why I hired you, that’s why I’m here to begin with. But right now none of that means shit. Right now the only thing matters to me is this kid, Lucia, Luschka, Ludmilla, she’s got all these different names and I don’t know what to call her and I never met her in my life. But all I care about now is getting her back.”

  Thank you, I thought.

  Because, as it says on the T-shirts, when you’re up to your ass in alligators you can forget that your primary purpose is to drain the swamp. It didn’t matter right now where the two of them were holed up in Sunset Park, didn’t matter if I found out tonight or tomorrow or never. In the morning I could hand everything I had to John Kelly and let him take it from there. It didn’t matter who brought Callander in, and it didn’t matter if he did fifteen years or twenty-five years or life, or if he died in some side street at Kenan Khoury’s hands or at mine. Or if he got away scot-free, with or without the money. That might matter tomorrow. It might not. But it didn’t matter tonight.

  It was very clear suddenly, as it really should have been all along. The only thing of importance was getting the girl back. Nothing else mattered at all.

  YURI and Dani came back a few minutes before eight. Yuri had a flight bag in either hand, both bearing the logo of an airline that had vanished in mergers. Dani was carrying a shopping bag.

  “Hey, we’re in business,” Kenan said, and his brother beat his hands together in applause. I didn’t start clapping, but I felt the same excitement. You’d have thought the money was for us.

  Yuri said, “Kenan, come here a minute. Look at this.”

  He opened one of the flight bags and spilled out its contents, banded stacks of hundreds, each wrapper bearing the imprint of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

  “Beautiful,” he said. “What’d you do, Yuri, make an unauthorized withdrawal? How’d you find a bank to rob this hour of the night?”

  Yuri handed him a stack of bills. Kenan slipped them from their wrapper, looked at the top one, and said, “I don’t have to look, do I? You wouldn’t ask me if everything was kosher. This is schlock, right?” He looked closely, thumbed the bill aside and looked at the next one. “Schlock,” he confirmed. “But very nice. All the same serial number? No, this one’s different.”

  “Three different numbers,” Yuri said.

  “Wouldn’t pass banks,” Kenan said. “They got scanners, pick up something electronically. Aside from that, they look good to me.” He crumpled a bill, smoothed it out, held it to the light and squinted at it. “Paper’s good. Ink looks right. Nice used bills, must have soaked ’em with coffee grounds and then ran ’em through the Maytag. No bleach, hold the fabric softener. Matt?”

  I took a real bill—or what I assumed was a real bill—from my own wallet and held it next to the one Kenan handed me. It seemed to me that Franklin looked a little less serene on the counterfeit specimen, a little more rakish. But I would never have given the bill a second glance in the ordinary course of things.

  “Very nice,” Kenan said. “What’s the discount?”

  “Sixty percent in quantity. You pay forty cents on the dollar.”

  “High.”

  “Good stuff don’t come cheap,” Yuri said.

  “That’s true. It’s a cleaner business than dope, too. Because who gets hurt, you stop and think about it?”

  “Debases the currency,” Peter said.

  “Does it really? It’s such a drop in the bucket. One savings-and-loan goes belly-up and it debases the currency more than twenty years’ worth of counterfeiting.”

  Yuri said, “This is on loan. No charge if we recover it and I bring it back. Otherwise I owe for it. Forty cents on the dollar.”

  “That’s very decent.”

  “He’s doing me a favor. What I want to know, will they spot it? And if they do—”

  “They won’t,” I said. “They’ll be looking quickly in bad light, and I don’t think they’ll be thinking of counterfeit. The bank wrappers are a nice touch. He print them, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll repackage them slightly,” I said. “We’ll use the Chase wrappers, but we’ll take six bills out of each stack and replace them with real ones, three on the top and three on the bottom. How much have you got here, Yuri?”

  “Two hundred fifty thousand in the schlock. And Dani’s got sixty thousand, a little over. From four different people.”

  I did the arithmetic. “That should put us right around eight hundred thousand. That’s close enough. I think we’re in business.”

  “Thank God,” Yuri said.

  Peter eased the wrapper off a bundle of counterfeit bills, fanned them, stood looking at them and shaking his head. Kenan pulled up a chair and began removing six bills from each packet.

  The phone rang.

  Chapter 20

  “This is tiresome,” he said.

  “For me too.”

  “Maybe it’s more trouble than it’s worth. You know, there are plenty of dope dealers around, and most of them have wives or daughters. Maybe we should just cut and run, maybe our next client will prove more cooperative.”

  It was our third conversation since Yuri had come back with the two flight bags full of counterfeit money. He had called at half-hour intervals, first to suggest his own agenda for making the transfer, then to find something wrong with every suggestion I made.

  “Especially if he hears how we cut before we run,” he said. “I’ll carve young Lucia into bite-size pieces, my friend. And go looking for other game tomorrow.”

  “I want to cooperate,” I said.

  “Your actions don’t show it.”

  “We have to meet face-to-face,” I said. “You have to have an opportunity to inspect the money and we have to be able to assure ourselves that the girl is all right.”

  “And then you people come down on us. You can have the whole area staked out, God knows how many armed men you can put together. Our resources are limited.”

  “But you can still create a standoff,” I said. “You’ll have the girl covered.”

  “A knife at her throat,” he said.

  “If you want.”

  “The edge of the blade right up against her skin.”

  “Then we give you the money,” I went on. “One of you holds on to the girl while the other makes sure the money’s all there. Then one of you takes the money to your vehicle while the other still holds the girl. Meanwhile your third man is posted where we can’t see him, covering us with a rifle.”

  “Someone could get behind him.”

  “How?” I demanded. “You’ll be in place first. You’ll see us arrive, all of us at the same time. You’ll have the drop on us, that’s to offset the numerical edge we’ve got. Your man with the rifle will be able to cover your withdrawal, and you’d be safe anyway because we’d have the girl back by this point and the money would be in the car with your partner, and out of our reach.”

  “I don’t like the face-to-face business,” he said.

  Nor, I thought, could he rely too strongly on the third man, the one covering his retreat with the rifle. Because I was virtually certain there were only two of them, so there wouldn’t be any third man. But if I let him think we figured their strength at three, maybe it would make him feel a little more secure. The value of the third man lay not in the covering fire he could lay down but in our belief that he was there.

  “Say we set up fifty yards apart. You bring the money halfway and then return to your lines. Then we bring the girl halfway and one of us stays there, knife at her throat, as you said??
?”

  As you said, I thought.

  “—while the other withdraws with the money. Then I release the girl and she runs to you while I back off.”

  “No good. You have the money and the girl at the same time and we’re on the other side of the field.”

  Around and around and around. The operator’s record-ed voice cut in, asking for more money, and he dropped a quarter in without missing a beat. He wasn’t worried about having calls traced, not at this stage. His calls were lasting longer and longer.

  If I’d been able to reach the Kongs early on, we could pick him up while he was still on the phone.

  I said, “All right, try it like this. We set up fifty yards apart, just as you said. You’ll be in place first, you’ll see us arrive. You’ll show the girl so we can see you’ve brought her. Then I’ll approach your position carrying the money.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yes. Unarmed.”

  “You could have a gun concealed.”

  “I’ll have a suitcase full of dough in each hand. A hidden gun’s not going to do me much good.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “You check the money. When you’re satisfied, you let the girl go. She joins her father and the rest of our people. Your man takes off with the money. You and I wait. Then you take off and I go home.”

  “You could grab me.”

  “I’m unarmed and you’ve got a knife, a gun, too, if you want. And your sharpshooter is behind a tree covering everybody with the rifle. It’s all going your way. I don’t see how you can have a problem with it.”

  “You’ll see my face.”

  “Wear a mask.”

  “Cuts the visibility. And you’d still be able to describe me even if you didn’t get that good a look at my face.”

  I thought, fuck it, let’s throw the dice.

  I said, “I already know what you look like, Ray.”

  I heard his intake of breath, then a stretch of silence, and for a minute there I was afraid I’d lost him.

  Then he said, “What do you know?”

  “I know your name. I know what you look like. I know about some of the women you killed. And one you almost killed.”

  “The little whore,” he said. “She heard my first name.”

  “I know your last name, too.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Why should I? Look it up for yourself, it’s right there on the calendar.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Can’t you figure that out for yourself?”

  “You sound like a cop.”

  “If I’m a cop, why isn’t there a pack of blue-and-whites lined up in front of your house?”

  “Because you don’t know where it is.”

  “Try Middle Village. Penelope Avenue.”

  I could almost feel him relax. “I’m impressed,” he said.

  “What kind of cop plays it this way, Ray?”

  “You’re in Landau’s pocket.”

  “Close. We’re in bed together, we’re partners. I’m married to his cousin.”

  “No wonder we couldn’t—”

  “Couldn’t what?”

  “Nothing. I should bail out now, cut the bitch’s throat and get the hell out.”

  “Then you’re dead,” I said. “An all-points goes out nationwide in a matter of hours, with you on the hook for Gotteskind and Alvarez, too. Do the deal and I guarantee I’ll sit on it for a week, longer if I can. Maybe forever.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I won’t want it to come out, will I? You can go set up shop on the other side of the country. Plenty of dope dealers in L.A. Plenty of fine-looking women out there, too. They love to go for a ride in a pretty new truck.”

  He was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “Go over it again. The whole scenario, from the time we arrive.”

  I went through it. He interrupted with a question from time to time and I answered them all. Finally he said, “I wish I could trust you.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “I’m the one who has to do the trusting. I’ll be walking up to you unarmed with a bag of money in each hand. If you decide you don’t trust me you can always kill me.”

  “Yes, I could,” he said.

  “But it’s better for you if you don’t. It’s better for both of us if the whole transaction goes off just the way it’s scheduled to. We both come out winners.”

  “You’re out a million dollars.”

  “Maybe that fits in with my plans, too.”

  “Oh?”

  “You figure it out,” I said, leaving him to puzzle out my own interfamilial secret agenda, some strategy I must have for getting the upper hand on my partner.

  “Interesting,” he said. “Where do you want to do the switch?”

  I was ready for the question. I had proposed enough other sites in earlier phone calls, and I’d been saving this one. “Green-Wood Cemetery,” I said.

  “I think I know where that is.”

  “You ought to. That’s where you dumped Leila Alvarez. It’s a distance from Middle Village, but you found your way there once before. It’s nine-twenty. There are two entrances on the Fifth Avenue side, one around Twenty-fifth Street, the other ten blocks south of there. Take the Twenty-fifth Street entrance and head south about twenty yards inside the fence. We’ll enter at Thirty-fifth and approach you from the south.”

  I laid it all out for him, like a war-games tactician re-creating the Battle of Gettysburg. “Ten-thirty,” I said. “That gives you over an hour to get there. No traffic at this hour, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Or do you need more time?”

  He didn’t need anything like an hour. He was in Sunset Park, a five-minute drive from the cemetery. But he didn’t need to know that I knew that.

  “That should be time enough.”

  “And you’ll have plenty of time to set up. We’ll enter ten blocks south of you at ten-forty. That gives you ten minutes lead time, plus the ten minutes it’ll take us to walk up to meet you.”

  “And they’ll stay fifty yards back,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “And you’ll come the rest of the way alone. With the money.”

  “Right.”

  “I liked it better with Khoury,” he said. “Where I said ‘Frog’ and he jumped.”

  “I can see where you would. Twice as much money this time, though.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “Leila Alvarez. Haven’t thought of her in a while.” His voice took on an almost dreamy quality. “She was really nice. Choice.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Lord, she was frightened,” he said. “Poor little bitch. She was really terrified.”

  WHEN I finally got off the phone I had to sit down. Kenan asked me if I was all right. I said I was.

  “You don’t look so hot,” he said. “You look like you need a drink, but I guess that’s the one thing you don’t need.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Yuri just made some coffee. I’ll get you a cup.”

  When he brought it I said, “I’m okay. It takes it out of you, talking to that son of a bitch.”

  “I know.”

  “I tipped my hand some, let him know some of what I know. It started to look as though that was the only way to get him off the dime. He wasn’t going to move unless he could control the situation completely. I decided to show him he was in a little weaker position than he realized.”

  Yuri said. “You know who he is?”

  “I know his name. I know what he looks like and the license number of the car he’s driving.” I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling his presence on the other end of the telephone line, sensing the workings of his mind. “I know who he is,” I said.

  I explained what I’d worked out with Callander, started to sketch out a diagram of the terrain, then realized that what we needed was a map. Yuri said there was a street map of Brooklyn somewhere in the apartment but didn’t know where. Kenan said Francine had kept one in the gl
ove box of the Toyota, and Peter went downstairs for it.

  We had cleared off the table. All of the money, repackaged to hide the counterfeit bills, was packed into two suitcases. I spread the map on the table and traced a route to the cemetery, indicating the two entrances on the graveyard’s western border. I explained how it would work, where we’d set up, how the exchange would be made.

  “Puts you right out in front,” Kenan observed.

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “If he tries anything—”

  “I don’t think he will.”

  You can always kill me, I’d told him. Yes I could, he’d said.

  “I am the one who should carry the bags,” Yuri said.

  “They’re not that heavy,” I said. “I can manage them.”

  “You make a joke, but I am serious. It is my daughter. I should be out in front.”

  I shook my head. If he ever got that close to Callander, I couldn’t trust him not to lose it and go for him. But I had a better reason to offer him. “I want Lucia to run to safety. If you’re there she’ll want to stay with you. I need you here,” I said, pointing to the map, “so you can call to her.”

  “You’ll tuck a gun in your belt,” Kenan said.

  “I probably will, but I don’t know what good it’ll do. If he tries anything I won’t have time to get it out. If he doesn’t I won’t have any use for it. What I wish I had is a Kevlar vest.”

  “That’s the bulletproof mesh? I heard it won’t stop a knife.”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It won’t always stop a bullet, either, but it gives you a sporting chance.”

  “You know where you can get one?”

  “Not at this hour. Forget it, it’s not important.”

  “No? It sounds pretty important to me.”

  “I don’t even know that they’ve got guns.”

  “Are you kidding? I didn’t think there was anybody in this town doesn’t have a gun. What about the third man, the sharpshooter, guy hiding behind a tombstone covering everybody? What do you figure he’s doing the job with, a fucking Wham-O slingshot?”

  “That’s if there is a third man. I was the one who mentioned him, and Callander was bright enough to follow my lead.”