"I guess I'm not. At least I didn't call Mick, so that saves having to call again and tell him I changed my mind. To tell you the truth, I'm glad I've got the work."
"Something to sink your teeth into."
"That's right. That's what I really need, more than I need a vacation."
"And it's a good case?"
I hadn't told her anything about it. I thought for a moment and said,
"It's a terrible case."
"Oh?"
"Jesus, the things people do to each other. You'd think I'd get used to it, but I never do."
"You want to talk about it?"
"When I see you. Are we on for tomorrow night?"
"Unless your work gets in the way."
"I don't see why it should. I'll come by for you around seven. If I'm going to be later than that I'll call."
I HAD a hot bath and a good night's sleep, and in the morning I went to the bank and added seventy $100 bills to the stash in my safe-deposit box. I deposited two thousand dollars to my checking account and kept the remaining thousand in my hip pocket.
There was a time when I would have rushed to give it away. I used to spend a lot of idle hours in empty churches, and I tithed religiously, so to speak, stuffing a precise ten percent of the cash I received into the next poor box I passed. This quaint custom had faded away in sobriety. I don't know why I stopped doing it, but then I couldn't tell you why I ever started doing it in the first place.
I could have stuffed my Aer Lingus ticket in the nearest poor box, for all the good I was going to get out of it. I stopped at the travel agent's and confirmed what I had already suspected, that my ticket was indeed nonrefundable. "Ordinarily I'd say get a doctor to write a letter saying you had to cancel for medical reasons," he said, "but that wouldn't work here because it's not the airline you're dealing with, it's an outfit that buys space wholesale from the airlines and offers it at a deep discount."
He offered to try to resell it for me, and I left it with him and walked to the subway.
I spent the whole day in Brooklyn. I'd taken a picture of Francine Khoury when I left the house on Colonial Road, and I showed it around at the Fourth Avenue D'Agostino's and at The Arabian Gourmet on Atlantic Avenue. I was working a colder trail than I would have liked—
it was Tuesday now, and the abduction had taken place on Thursday—
but there was nothing I could do about that now. It would have been nice if Pete had called me on Friday instead of waiting until the weekend had passed, but they'd had other things to do.
Along with the picture, I showed around a card from Reliable with my name on it. I was investigating in connection with an insurance claim, I explained. My client's car had been clipped by another vehicle, which had sped off without stopping, and it would expedite the processing of her claim if we could identify the other party.
At D'Agostino's I talked with a cashier, who remembered Francine as a regular customer who always paid cash, a memorable trait in our society but par for the course in dope-dealing circles. "And I can tell you something else about her," the woman said. "I bet she's a good cook." I must have looked mystified.
"No prepared foods, no frozen this and that. Always fresh ingredients. Young as she is, you don't find many that are into cooking.
But you never see any TV dinners in her cart."
The bag boy remembered her, too, and volunteered the information that she was always a two-dollar tipper. I asked about a truck, and he remembered a blue panel truck that had been parked out front and moved off after her. He hadn't noticed the make of the truck or the license plate but was reasonably certain of the color, and he thought there was something about TV repair painted on the side.
They remembered more on Atlantic Avenue because there had been more to notice. The woman behind the counter recognized the picture immediately and was able to tell me just what Francine had bought—olive oil, sesame tahini, foul mudamas, and some other terms I didn't recognize. She hadn't seen the actual abduction, though, because she'd been waiting on another customer. She knew something curious had happened, because a customer had come in with some story about two men and a woman running from the store and leaping into the back of a truck. The customer had been concerned that they might have robbed the store and were making a getaway.
I managed a few more interviews before noon, at which time I thought I'd go next door for lunch.
Instead I remembered the advice I'd been so quick to hand out to Peter Khoury. I hadn't been to a meeting myself since Saturday, and here it was Tuesday and I'd be spending the evening with Elaine. I called the Intergroup office and learned that there was a twelve-thirty meeting about ten minutes away in Brooklyn Heights. The speaker was a little old lady, as prim and proper in appearance as could be, and her story made it clear that she had not been ever thus. She'd been a bag lady, evidently, sleeping in doorways and never bathing or changing her clothes, and she kept stressing how filthy she had been, how foul she had smelled. It was hard to square the story with the person at the head of the table.
AFTER the meeting I went back to Atlantic Avenue and picked up where I'd left off. I bought a sandwich and a can of cream soda at a deli and interviewed the proprietor while I was there. I ate my lunch standing up outside, then talked to the clerk and a couple of customers at a corner newsstand. I went into Aleppo and talked to the cashier and two of the waiters. I went back to Ayoub's— I'd taken to thinking of The Arabian Gourmet by that name, since I kept talking to people who were calling it that.
I went back there, and by this time the woman had been able to come up with the name of the customer who'd been afraid the men in the blue van had robbed the place. I found the man listed in the phone book, but no one answered when I rang the number.
I had dropped the insurance-investigation story when I got to Atlantic Avenue because it didn't seem likely to jibe with what people would have seen. On the other hand, I didn't want to leave the impression that anything on the scale of kidnapping and homicide had taken place, or someone might deem it his civic duty to report the matter to the police. The story I put together, and it tended to vary somewhat depending upon my audience of the moment, went more or less along these lines: My client had a sister who was considering an arranged marriage to an illegal alien who was hoping to stay in the country. The prospective groom had a girlfriend whose family was bitterly opposed to the marriage. Two men, relatives of the girlfriend, had been harassing my client for days in an attempt to enlist her aid to stop the marriage.
She was sympathetic to their position but didn't really want to get involved.
They had been dogging her steps on Thursday, and followed her to Ayoub's. When she left they got her into the back of their truck on a pretext and drove around with her, trying to convince her. By the time they let her out she was slightly hysterical, and in the course of getting away from them she lost not only the groceries (olive oil, tahini, and so on) but also her purse, which at the time contained a rather valuable bracelet. She didn't know the name of these men, or how to get in touch with them, and—
I don't suppose it made much sense, but I wasn't pitching it to the networks for a TV pilot, I was just using it to reassure some reasonably solid citizens that it was both safe and noble to be as helpful as possible.
I got a lot of gratuitous advice— "Those marriages are a bad thing, she should tell her sister it's not worth it," for instance. But I also got a fair amount of information.
I KNOCKED off a little after four and caught a train to Columbus Circle, beating the rush hour by a few minutes. There was mail for me at the desk, most of it junk. I ordered something from a catalog once and now I get dozens of them every month. I live in one small room and wouldn't have room for the catalogs themselves, let alone the products they want me to buy.