A Walk Among the Tombstones (31 page)

But he would have known that much from the weeks of stalking her.

"The dog's name is Watson."

"Watson," I said.

Across the room, the big dog shifted position, pricked up its ears.

Yuri was nodding.

"And the other dog?"

"You want so much," he said. "How many dogs do you need?"

I waited.

"She couldn't tell me what breed the other dog was. She was young when it died. They had to put it to sleep, she said. Silly term for it, don't you think? When you kill something you ought to have the courage to call it that. You're not saying anything. Are you still there?"

"I'm still here."

"I gather it was a mongrel. So many of us are. Now the name's a bit of a problem. It's a Russian word and I may not have it right. How's your Russian, my friend?"

"A little rusty."

"Rusty's a good name for a dog. Maybe it was Rusty. You're a tough audience, my friend. It's hard to get a laugh out of you."

"I'm a captive audience," I said.

"Ah, would that it were so. We could have a very interesting conversation under those circumstances, you and I. Ah, well. Some other time, perhaps."

"We'll see."

"Indeed we will. But you want the dog's name, don't you? The dog's dead, my friend. What good is his name? Give a dog a dead name, give a dead dog a bad name--"

I waited.

"I may be saying this wrong. Balalaika."

"Balalaika," I said.

"It's supposed to be the name of a musical instrument, or so she tells me. What do you say? Does it strike a chord?"

I looked at Yuri Landau. His nod was unequivocal. On the phone, Ray was saying something or other but the words weren't getting through to me. I felt light-headed, and had to lean against the kitchen counter or I might have fallen.

The girl was alive.

As soon as I got off the phone with Ray, Yuri fell on me and wrapped me up in a bear hug. "Balalaika,"

he said, invoking the name as if it were a magic spell. "She's alive, my Luschka is alive!"

I was still in his embrace when the door opened and the Khourys came in, trailed by Landau's man Dani.

Kenan was carrying an old-fashioned leather satchel with a zipper top, Peter a white plastic shopping bag from Kroger's. "She's alive," Yuri told them.

"You spoke with her?"

He shook his head. "They told me the dog's name. She remembered Balalaika. She's alive."

I don't know how much sense this made to the Khourys, who had been out on a fund-raising mission when the recognition signals were arranged, but they got the gist of it.

"Now all you need is a million dollars," Kenan told him.

"Money you can always get."

"You're right," Kenan said. "People don't realize that but it's absolutely true." He opened the leather

satchel and began taking out stacks of wrapped bills, arranging them in rows on top of the mahogany table. "You got some good friends, Yuri. Good thing, too, is most of 'em don't believe in banks. People don't realize how much of the country's economy runs on cash. You hear cash, you think drugs, you think gambling."

"Tip of the iceberg," Peter said.

"You got it. Don't just think of the rackets. Think dry cleaners, think barbershops, beauty parlors. Any place that handles a lot of cash, so they can keep an extra set of books and skim half the take out from under the IRS."

"Think coffee shops," Peter said. "Yuri, you shoulda been a Greek."

"A Greek? Why should I be a Greek?"

"Every corner there's a coffee shop, right? Man, I worked for one of them. Ten employees on my shift, six of us were off the books, paid in cash. Why? Because they got all this cash they're not declaring, got to keep the expenses in proportion. If they report thirty cents of every dollar goes through the register, that's a lot. And you know the frosting on the cake? Eight and a quarter percent sales tax on every sale, law says they have to collect it. But the seventy percent of sales they don't report, they can't exactly hand over the tax on that, can they? So it gets skimmed, too. Pure tax-free profit, every penny of it."

"Not just Greeks," Yuri said.

"No, but they got it down to a science. You were Greek, all you gotta do is hit twenty coffee shops.

You don't think they all got fifty grand in the safe, or stuffed in the mattress, or under a loose board in the clothes closet? Hit twenty and you got your million."

"But I am not a Greek," Yuri said.

Kenan asked him if he knew any diamond merchants. "They have a lot of cash," he said. Peter said a lot of the jewelry business was markers, IOUs that passed back and forth. Kenan said there was still some cash in it somewhere, and Yuri said it didn't matter because he didn't know anyone in diamonds.

I went into the other room and left them at it.

I WANTED to call TJ and I got out the piece of paper with all the calls the Kongs had logged to Kenan's phone. I found the number of the laundromat pay phone but hesitated. Would TJ know to answer it? And would it compromise him if the place was crowded? And suppose Ray picked up the phone? That seemed unlikely, but--

Then I remembered there was a simpler way. I could beep him and let him call me. I seemed to be having trouble adjusting to this new technology. I still automatically thought in more primitive terms.

I found his beeper number in my notebook, but before I could dial it the phone rang, and it was TJ.

"Man was just here," he said. He sounded excited. "Just on this phone."

"It must have been someone else."

"No chance, Vance. Mean dude, you look at him an' you know you seein' evil. Wasn't you just talkin' to him? I got this flash, said my man Matt is talkin' to this dude."

"I was, but I got off the phone with him at least ten minutes ago.

Maybe closer to fifteen."

"Yeah, be about right."

"I thought you'd call right away."

"I couldn't, man. I had to follow the dude."

"You followed him?"

"What you think I do, run away when I see him comin'? I don't walk out arm in arm with the man, but he walk out an' I give him a minute an' I slip out after him."

"That's dangerous TJ. The man's a killer."

"Man, am I supposed to be impressed? I'm on the Deuce 'bout every day of my life. Can't walk down that street without you're followin' some killer or other."

"Where did he go?"

"Turned left, walked to the corner."

"Forty-ninth Street."

"Then walked across to the deli on the other side of the avenue.

Went inside, stayed a minute or two, came out again. Don't guess he had them make him a sandwich on account of he wasn't in there that long.

Could of picked up a six-pack. Package he carried was about that size."

"Then where did he go?"

"Back the way he came. Sucker walked right past me, crossed Fifth again, and he's headin' straight back for the laundry. I thought, shit, can't follow him back in there, have to hang around outside until he makes his call."

"He didn't call here again."

"Didn't call nowhere, 'cause he didn't go inside the laundry. Got in his car an' drove off. Didn't even know he had a car until he got into it. It was parked just the other side of the laundry, where you couldn't see it if you were sittin' where I was."

"A car or a truck?"

"Said a car. I tried to stay with it but there wasn't no way. I was layin' half a block back, not wantin' to tag him too close on his way back to the laundry, and he was in the car an' outta there before I could do nothin'. Time I could get to the corner he was around it an' out of sight."

"But you got a good look at him."

"Him? Yeah, I saw him."

"You could recognize him again?"

"Man, could you recognize yo' mama? Kind of a question is that?

Man is five-eleven, one hundred seventy pounds, real light brown hair, has eyeglasses with brown plastic frames. Wearin' black leather lace-up shoes an' navy pants and a blue zip-up jacket. An' about the lamest sport shirt you ever saw.

Blue an' white checks. Could I recognize him? Man, if I could draw I'da drawed him. You put me with that artist you was tellin' me about, we'd wind up with somethin' looked more like him than a photograph."

"I'm impressed."

"Yeah? Car was a Honda Civic, sort of a blue-gray, a little beat up.

Up until he got into it I figured I'd follow him right back to where he's stayin'. He snatched somebody, right?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

"A fourteen-year-old girl."

"Motherfucker," he said. "I knowed that, maybe I tag him a little closer, run a little faster."

"You did fine."

"What I think I do now, I check out the neighborhood some.

Maybe I see where he park his car."

"If you're sure you'd recognize it."

"Well, I got the plate number. Be a lot of Hondas, but not too many got the same license plate."

He read it out to me and I jotted it down and started to tell him how pleased I was with his performance.

He didn't let me finish. "Man," he said, exasperated, "how long we gonna go on this way, with you bein'

stone amazed every time I do somethin' right?"

"IT'S going to take us a few hours to get the money together," I told him when he called again. "It's more than he has and it's going to be difficult to raise it at this hour."

"You're not trying to lower the price, are you?"

"No, but if you want the whole amount you'll have to be patient."

"How much do you have now?"

"I don't have a count."

"I'll call in an hour," he said.

* * *

"YOU can use this phone," I told Yuri. "He won't be calling for the next hour. How much have we got?"

"A little over four," Kenan said. "Less than half."

"Not enough."

"I don't know," he said. "One way to look at it, who else are they gonna sell her to? If you tell him this is all we got, take it or leave it, what's he gonna do?"

"The trouble is you don't know what he's likely to do."

"Yeah, I keep forgetting he's a lunatic."

"He wants a reason to kill the girl." I didn't want to stress this in front of Yuri, but it had to be said.

"That's what got them started in the first place. They like killing.

She's alive, and he'll keep her alive as long a she's their ticket to the money, but he'll kill her the minute he thinks he can get away with it, or that he's lost his shot at the money. I don't want to tell him we've only got half a mil. I'd rather show up with half a mil and tell him it's the whole thing, and hope he doesn't count it until we've got the girl back."

Kenan thought about this. "The trouble is," he said, "the cocksucker already knows what four hundred thousand looks like."

"See if you can raise some more," I said, and went off to use the Snoopy phone.

THERE used to be a number you called at the Department of Motor Vehicles. You gave your shield number and told them the plate you wanted to trace and somebody looked it up and read it off to you. I no longer knew that special number, and had a feeling it had long since been phased out. Nobody answered the listed number for DMV.

I called Durkin but he wasn't at the station house. Kelly wasn't at his desk, either, and there was no point in paging him, because he couldn't do what I wanted him to do from a distance. I remembered when I'd been in to pick up the Gotteskind file from Durkin and pictured Bellamy at the adjacent desk, having a one-sided conversation with his computer terminal.

I called Midtown North and got him. "Matt Scudder," I said.

"Oh, hey," he said. "How you doing? Joe's not around, I'm afraid."

"That's okay," I said. "Maybe you can do me a favor. I was riding around with a friend of mine and some son of a bitch in a Honda Civic clipped her fender and just plain took off. Most flagrant thing you ever saw."

"Damn. And you were in the car when it happened? Man's a fool, leaving the scene of an accident. Most likely drunk or on drugs."

"I wouldn't be surprised. The thing is--"

"You got the plate? I'll run it for you."

"I'd really appreciate it."

"Hey, nothing to it. I just ask the computer. Hang on."

I waited.

"Damn," he said.

"Something the matter?"

"Well, they changed the damn password for getting into the DMV

data bank. I enter like you're supposed to and it won't let me in. Keeps saying back 'Invalid Password.' If you call tomorrow I'm sure--"

"I'd love to move on this tonight. Before he gets a chance to sober up, if you follow me."

"Oh, definitely. If I could help you--"

"Isn't there someone you can call?"

'Yeah," he said with feeling. "That bitch down in Records, but she'll tell me she can't give it out. I get that crap from her all the time."

"Tell her it's a Code Five emergency."

"Say that again?"

"Just tell her it's a Code Five emergency," I said, "and she'd better give you the password before you wind up with circuits backed up all the way to Cleveland."

"Never heard that before," he said. "Hang on, I'll give it a shot."

He put me on Hold. Across the room, Michael Jackson peeked at me through the fingers of his white glove. Bellamy came back on the line and said, "Damn if it didn't work. 'Code Five emergency.' Cut right through the bullshit. She came up with the password. Lemme enter it.

There you go. Now what was that license number?"

I gave it to him.

"Let's just see what we get. Okay, didn't take long. Vehicle is a Eighty-eight Honda Civic two-door, color is pewter... Pewter? Man, why can't they say gray? But you don't care about that. Owner is-- you got a pencil? Callander, Raymond Joseph." He spelled the last name.