"You have to know a number to look it up in a reverse directory. A reverse directory has phones listed numerically, and you look up the number and it tells you the location."
"Oh."
"But there is a book that lists pay phones by location, yes. And yes, I could call an operator and pass myself off as a police officer in order to obtain a number."
"So you were just being nice to TJ."
"Nice? According to you I was sending him to his death. No, I wasn't just being nice. Looking in the book or conning the operator would give me the number of the pay phone, but it wouldn't tell me if the number's posted on the phone. That's what I'm trying to find out."
"Oh," she said. And, a few minutes later, "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why do you care if the number's posted on the phone? What difference does it make?"
"I don't know that it does make a difference. But the kidnappers knew to call those phones. If the number's posted, well, then there was nothing special about their knowledge. If not, they found out one way or another."
"By conning the operator or looking in the book."
"Which would mean that they know how to con an operator, or where to find a list of pay phones. I don't know what it would mean.
Probably nothing. Maybe I want to get the information because it's the only thing about the phones I can find out."
"What do you mean?"
"It's been nagging at me," I said. "Not what I sent TJ for, that's easy enough to find out with or without his help. But I was sitting up last night and it struck me that the only contact with the kidnappers was phone contact. That was the only trace they left of themselves. The abduction itself was clean as a whistle. A few people saw them, and even more people saw them take that schoolteacher off Jamaica Avenue, but they didn't leave anything you could use to reel them in. But they did make some phone calls. They made four or five calls to Khoury's house in Bay Ridge."
"There's no way to trace them, is there? After the connection is broken?"
"There ought to be," I said. "I was on the phone yesterday for over an hour with different phone-company personnel. I found out a lot of things about how the phones work. Every call you make is logged."
"Even local calls?"
"Uh-huh. That's how they know how many message units you use in each billing period. It's not like a gas meter where they're just keeping track of the running total. Each call gets recorded and charged to your account."
"How long do they keep that data?"
"Sixty days."
"So you could get a list—"
"Of all the calls made from a particular number. That's how the data is organized. Say I'm Kenan Khoury. I call up, I say I need to know what calls were made from my phone on a given day, and they can give me a printout with the date and time and duration of every call I made."
"But that's not what you want."
"No, it's not. What I want is the calls made to Khoury's phone, but that's not how they log them, because there's no point. They've got the technology to tell you what number's calling you before you even pick up the phone. They can mount a little LED gadget on your phone that'll display the number of the calling party and you can decide whether or not you want to talk."
"That's not available yet, is it?"
"No, not in New York, and it's controversial. It would probably cut down on the nuisance calls and put a lot of telephone perverts out of business, but the police are afraid it'd keep a lot of people from phoning in anonymous tips, because they'd suddenly be a lot less anonymous."
"If it were available now, and if Khoury had had it on his phone—"
"Then we'd know what phones the kidnappers called from. They probably used pay phones, they've been professional enough in other respects, but at least we'd know which pay phones."
"Is that important?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "I don't know what's important. But it doesn't matter because I can't get the information. It seems to me that if the calls are logged somewhere in the computer there ought to be some way to sort them by the called number, but everyone I talked to said it was impossible. That's not the way they're stored, so they can't be accessed that way."
"I don't know anything about computers."
"Neither do I, and it's a pain in the ass. I try to talk to people and I don't understand half the words they use."
"I know what you mean," she said. "That's how I feel when we watch football."
I STAYED over that night, and in the morning I used up some of her message units while she was at the gym. I called a lot of police officers and I told a lot of lies.
Mostly I claimed to be a journalist doing a roundup piece on criminal abductions for a true-crime magazine. I got a lot of cops who had nothing to say or were too busy to talk to me, and I got a fair number who were happy to cooperate but wanted to talk about cases that were years old or ones in which the criminals had been spectacularly stupid, or had been caught through some particularly clever police work.
What I wanted— well, that was the problem, I didn't really know what I wanted. I was fishing.
Ideally, I would have loved to hook a live one, somebody who had been abducted and survived. It was conceivable that they had worked their way up to murder, that there had been earlier exploits, joint or individual, in which the victim had been released alive. It was also possible that a victim could have somehow escaped. There was a world of difference, though, between postulating the existence of such a woman and finding her.
My pose as a free-lance crime reporter wouldn't do me any good in my search for a live witness. The system is pretty good about shielding rape victims— at least until they get to court, where the defendant's attorney gets to violate them all over again in front of God and everybody. Nobody was going to give out the names of rape victims over the phone.
So my pitch changed for the sex-crimes units. I became a private investigator again, Matthew Scudder, retained by a film producer who was making a TV movie of the week about abduction and rape. The actress selected for the lead— I wasn't authorized to disclose her name at the present time— wanted an opportunity to research the role in depth, specifically by meeting one-on-one with women who had themselves been through this ordeal. She wanted, essentially, to learn as much as she could about the experience short of undergoing it herself, and the women who assisted her would be compensated as technical advisers and could be listed as such in the credits or not, as they preferred.
Naturally I didn't want names or numbers, and had no intention of attempting to initiate contact myself.
My thought was that perhaps someone from the unit, possibly a woman who had done victim counseling, could make contact with whatever victims struck her as likely prospects. The woman in our scenario, I explained, was abducted by a pair of sadistic rapists who forced her into a truck, brutalized her, and threatened her with grievous physical harm, threatened specifically to maim her. Obviously someone whose experience was in any way parallel to our fictional narrative would be just what we were looking for. If such a woman was interested in helping us out, and perhaps in helping in some small way other women who might be exposed to such treatment in the future, or who had already gone through it, and might find it a cathartic, even a therapeutic, experience to coach a Hollywood actress in what could be a showcase role—
The whole thing played surprisingly well. Even in New York, where you're always coming upon film crews shooting location sequences on the street, the mere mention of the movie business tends to turn people's heads. "Just have anyone who's interested give me a call," I wound up, leaving my name and number. "They don't have to give their names. They can remain anonymous throughout the entire process, if they want."
Elaine walked in just as I was finishing my pitch to a woman in the Manhattan Sex Crimes Unit. When I got off the phone she said, "How are you going to get all of these calls at your hotel? You're never there."