A Walk Among the Tombstones (24 page)

I walked for a couple of hours. I never consciously planned on walking all the way to Bay Ridge, but that's what I wound up doing. At first I just thought I'd walk eight or ten blocks and then catch the first bus that came along. By the time I got to the first of the numbered streets I realized I was only about a mile from Green-Wood Cemetery. I cut over to Fifth Avenue and walked to the cemetery and went in, strolling for ten or fifteen minutes among the graves. The grass was bright the way it never is except in early spring, and there were a lot of spring bulbs in bloom around the headstones, along with other flowers that had been placed in urns.

The cemetery covers a vast expanse of ground and I had no idea in what section of it Leila Alvarez had been lost and found, although there may well have been some indication in the news story. If so I had long since forgotten, and what difference did it make, anyway? I wasn't going to psych out anything by tuning in to the vibrations emanating from the patch of grass on which she'd lain. I'm willing to believe that some people can operate that way, that they can use willow twigs to find lost objects and missing children, even that they can see auras that escape my vision (although I wasn't sure I'd grant such powers to Danny Boy's latest girlfriend). But I couldn't.

Still, just being in a place might jog a thought loose, allow a mental connection that might otherwise never be made. Who knows how the process works?

Maybe I went there looking for some kind of connection to the Alvarez girl. Maybe I just wanted to spend a few minutes walking on green grass, and looking at the flowers.

I ENTERED the cemetery at Twenty-fifth Street and left it half a mile south at Thirty-fourth. By this point I had made my way through all of Park Slope and was on the northern edge of the Sunset Park section, and just a couple of blocks from the small park that gave the neighborhood its name.

I walked to the park, and across it. Then, one by one, I made my way to all six of the pay phones that had been used to call the Khoury house, starting with the one on New Utrecht Avenue at Forty-first Street.

The one I was most interested in was on Fifth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth. That was the phone they had used twice, the one that thus figured to be closest to their base of operations. Unlike the other phones, it was not located on the street but just inside the entrance of a twenty-four-hour laundromat.

There were two women in the place, both of them fat. One was folding laundry while the other sat in a chair tipped back against the concrete-block wall and read a copy of People magazine with Sandra Dee's picture on the cover. Neither of them paid any attention to the other, or to me. I dropped a quarter in the phone and called Elaine.

When she picked up I said, "Do all laundromats have telephones? Is it a regular thing, are you always going to find a pay phone in a laundromat?"

"Do you have any idea how many years I've been waiting for you to ask me that?"

"Well?"

"It's flattering that you think I know everything, but I have to tell you something. I haven't set foot inside a laundromat in years. In fact I'm not sure I've ever been in one. We have machines in the basement. So I can't answer your question, but I can ask you one. Why?"

"Two of the calls to Khoury the night of the kidnapping came from a laundromat pay phone in Sunset Park."

"And you're there right now. You're calling me from that very phone."

"Right."

"And? Why does it matter if other laundromats have phones? Don't tell me, I'll figure it out for myself. I can't figure it out for myself.

Why?"

"I was thinking they'd have to live very close for it to occur to them to use this phone. You can't see it from the street, so unless you lived within a block or two of it you wouldn't think of it when you needed to make a phone call. Unless every laundromat in the world has a phone."

"Well, I don't know about laundromats. There's no phone in our basement. What do you do about laundry?"

"Me? There's a laundry around the corner."

"They have a phone?"

"I don't know. I drop it off in the morning and pick it up at night, if I remember. They do everything. I give it to them dirty and it comes back clean."

"I bet they don't separate colors."

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

I left the laundromat and had a cafe con leche at the Cuban lunch counter at the corner. They'd talked on that phone, the sons of bitches. I was that close to them.

They had to live in the neighborhood. And not just in the general area, but almost certainly within a block or two of the laundromat. It wasn't hard for me to start believing I could feel their presence somewhere within a few hundred yards of where I was sitting. But that was a lot of crap. I didn't have to pick up vibrations, all I had to do was figure out what must have happened.

They picked her up when she left the house, tailed her to D'Agostino's, laid off when the bag boy walked her to her car, then tailed her again to Atlantic Avenue. They made the snatch when she came out of Ayoub's and drove off with her in the back of the truck. And headed where?

Any of dozens of places. Some side street in Red Hook. An alleyway behind a warehouse. A garage.

There was a gap of several hours between the kidnapping and the first phone call, and I figured they had spent a good portion of those hours doing to her what they had done to Pam Cassidy. After she was dead they'd have headed for home, parked in their own parking space if they weren't there already. The truck, which had borne lettering identifying it as the vehicle of a TV outfit in Queens, would get some cosmetic attention. They'd paint over the lettering-- or just wash it off, if they'd applied washable paint to begin with. If they had the right setup in their garage, the truck might get a whole change of color.

Then what? A quick course in Meat-cutting for Beginners? They could have done that then, could have waited until afterward. It didn't matter.

Then, at 3:38, the first call. At 4:01, the second call-- Ray's first call-- from the laundromat. More calls, until at 8:01 the sixth call sent the Khourys off to deliver the money. Having made that call, Ray or another man would get in position to watch the pay phone at Flatbush and Farragut, dialing its number when Kenan approached.

Or was that necessary? They'd told Kenan to be there at eight-thirty. They could have called the phone at one-minute intervals starting a few minutes before the appointed hour; whenever Khoury arrived and answered the phone, he'd have the impression that they'd called when he and his brother drove up.

Immaterial. However they did it, they made the call and Kenan answered it and they went next to Veterans Avenue, where one or more of the kidnappers was probably already in place. Another call came in, probably coordinated with the Khourys' arrival because the kidnappers would in this instance want to be in position to watch the Khourys walk away from the money.

Once they did, once they were out of the way, once it was quite clear no one had hung back to watch the car, then Ray and his friend or friends grabbed the money and took off.

No.

At least one of them lingered in the area and watched the Khourys look in the car and fail to find Francine. Then a call to the pay phone telling them to go home, that she'd be back there before they were. And then, while the Khourys did in fact return to Colonial Road, the kidnappers returned to home base. Parked the truck, and--

No. No, the truck had stayed in the garage. They hadn't completely disguised it yet, and Francine Khoury's body was probably still in the back. They had used another vehicle to drive out to Veterans Avenue.

The Ford Tempo, stolen for the occasion? That was possible. Or a third car, with the Tempo stolen and

stashed, to be used for one purpose only, the delivery of the remains.

So many possibilities...

One way or another, though, they tricked the Tempo out now with Francine's butchered body. Cut up the corpse, wrapped each segment in plastic, secured each parcel with tape. Broke the lock of the trunk, filled it up like a meat locker, drove in two cars to Colonial Road and around the corner to a parking spot. Parked the Tempo, and whoever drove it joined his buddy in the other car, and they went home.

To $400,000 and the satisfaction of having had their crime go off flawlessly.

Only one thing left to do. A phone call to send Khoury around the corner to the parked Ford. The job's all done, you're flushed with triumph, but you have to rub his nose in it. What a temptation to use your own phone, the one right there on the table. Khoury hadn't called the cops, he hadn't used any backup, he'd parted readily with the money, so how was he ever going to know where this last call was coming from?

What the hell...

But no, wait a minute, you've done everything right so far, you've been strictly professional about this, so why fuck it up now? What's the sense in that?

On the other hand, you don't have to be a fanatic. Up to now you've used a different phone for every call and made sure every phone you used was a minimum of half a dozen blocks from every other phone.

Just in case there was a trace, just in case they staked out one of those phones.

But they didn't. That's clear now, they didn't do anything of the sort, so there's no need now to use more caution than the circumstances require. Use a pay phone, yes, do that much, but use the most convenient one around, the one that was your first choice, that's why you made your own first call from it.

While you're at it, do your laundry. You've been doing bloody work, you got your clothes filthy, so why not throw a load of wash in the machine?

No, hardly that. Not with four hundred large sitting on the kitchen table. You wouldn't wash those clothes. You'd get rid of them and buy new.

I WALKED up and down every street within two blocks of the laundromat, working within the rectangle formed by Fourth and Sixth avenues and Forty-eighth and Fifty-second streets. I don't know that I was hunting for anything in particular, although I probably would have looked twice at blue panel trucks with homemade lettering on their sides. What I most wanted was to get a feel for the neighborhood and see if anything caught my eye.

The neighborhood was economically and ethnically diverse, with scattered houses crumbling from neglect and others being spruced up and converted for single-family occupancy by their new upscale owners.

There were blocks of row houses, some still clad in a crazy quilt of aluminum and asphalt siding, others stripped of this improvement and their bricks repointed. There were blocks, too, of detached frame houses with little patches of lawn. Some of the lawns were used for parking, while some of the houses had driveways and garages. I saw a lot of street life throughout, a lot of mothers with small children, a lot of furiously energetic kids, a lot of men working on their cars or sitting on stoops, drinking from cans in brown paper bags.

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.

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."