"Yeah, of course I'm gonna do that, but I wish I knew your angle."
"It's not important."
"I could tell you to come in. Or have you picked up, if you'd rather play it that way."
"You could," I agreed. "But you wouldn't get a damn thing more than I already told you. You could cost me some time, but you'd be wasting time of your own."
"You got your fucking nerve, I'll say that for you."
"Hey, come on," I said. "You've got something now that you didn't before I called. If you want to cop a resentment I suppose you can hang on to one, but what's the point?"
"What am I supposed to say, thank you?" It wouldn't hurt, I thought, but kept the thought to myself.
"The hell with it," he said. "But I think you'd better let me have your address and phone, just in case I need to get in touch with you."
The mistake had been in letting him have my name. I could find out if he was enough of a detective to look me up in the Manhattan book, but why? I gave him my address and phone and told him I was sorry I wasn't able to answer all his questions, but I had certain responsibilities to a client of mine. "That would have pissed me off when I was on the job," I said, "so I can understand why it would have the same effect on you. But I have to do what I have to do."
"Yeah, that's a line I've heard before. Well, maybe it's the same people in both cases, and maybe something'll break if we put 'em side by side. That'd be nice."
That was as close to "thank you" as we were going to get, and I was happy to settle for it. I said it would be very nice, and wished him luck. I asked to be remembered to his father.
Chapter 10
That night I went to a meeting and Elaine attended her class, and afterward we both took cabs and met at Mother Goose and listened to the music. Danny Boy turned up around eleven-thirty and joined us. He had a girl with him, very tall, very thin, very black and very strange. He introduced her as Kali. She acknowledged the introductions with a nod but didn't say a word or appear to hear anything anyone else said for a good half hour, at which point she leaned forward, stared hard at Elaine, and said, "Your aura is teal blue and very pure, very beautiful."
"Thank you," Elaine said.
"You have a very old soul," Kali said, and that was the last thing she said, and the last sign she gave that she was aware of our presence.
Danny Boy didn't have anything much to report, and we mostly just enjoyed the music, chatting about nothing important between sets. It was fairly late when we left. In the cab to her place I said, "You have a very old soul and a teal-blue aura and a cute little ass."
"She's very perceptive," Elaine said. "Most people don't notice my teal-blue aura until the second or third meeting."
"Not to mention your old soul."
"Actually, it would be a good idea not to mention my old soul. You can say what you want about my cute little ass. Where does he find them?"
"I don't know."
"If they were all stock bimbettes from Central Casting it would be one thing, but his girls don't run to type. This one, Kali— what do you figure she was on?"
"No idea."
"Because she certainly seemed to be traveling in another realm. Do people still use psychedelics? She was probably on magic mushrooms, or some hallucinogenic fungus that grows only on decaying leather.
I'll tell you one thing, she could make good money as a dominatrix."
"Not if her leather's decaying. And not unless she could keep her mind on her work."
"You know what I mean. She's got the looks for it, and the presence. Can't you see yourself groveling at her feet and loving every minute of it?"
"No."
"Well, you," she said. "The Marquis de Suave himself. Remember the time I tied you up?"
The driver was working hard at hiding his amusement. "Would you please shut up," I said.
"Remember? You fell asleep."
"That shows how safe I felt in your presence," I said. "Will you please shut up?"
"I will wrap myself in my teal-blue aura," she said, "and I will be very quiet."
BEFORE I left the following morning she told me she had a good feeling about the calls from rape victims. "Today's the day," she said.
But she turned out to be wrong, teal-blue aura or not. There were no calls at all. When I talked to her that night she was glum about it. "I guess that's it," she said. "Three Wednesday, one yesterday, and now nothing. I thought I was going to be a hero, come up with something significant."
"Ninety-eight percent of an investigation is insignificant," I said.
"You do everything you can think of because you don't know what will be useful. You must have been sensational on the phone because you got a very big response, but it's pointless to feel like a failure because you didn't turn up a living victim of the three stooges. You were looking for a needle in a haystack, and it's probably a haystack that didn't have a needle in it in the first place."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean they probably didn't leave any witnesses. They probably killed every woman they victimized, so you were probably trying to find a woman who doesn't exist."
"Well, if she doesn't exist," she said, "then I say to hell with her."
TJ WAS calling in every day, sometimes more than once a day. I had given him fifty dollars to check out the two Brooklyn phones, and he couldn't have come out very far ahead on the deal, because what he hadn't spent on subways and buses he was sinking into telephone calls.
He got a better return on his time shilling for monte dealers or assisting a street peddler or doing any of the other street chores that combined to give him an income. But he still kept pestering me for work.
Saturday I wrote out a check for my rent and paid the other monthly bills that had come in— the phone bill, my credit card. Looking at the telephone bill made me think again of the calls made to Kenan Khoury's phone. I had made another attempt a few days before to find a phone-company employee who could figure out a way to supply that data, and had been told once again that it was unobtainable.
So that was on my mind when TJ called around ten-thirty. "Give me some more phones to check out,"
he pleaded. "The Bronx, Staten Island, anywhere."
"I'll tell you what you can do for me," I said. "I'll give you a number and you tell me who called it."
"Say what?"
"Oh, nothing."
"No, you said somethin', man. Tell me what it was."
"Maybe you could do it at that," I said. "Remember how you sweet-talked the operator out of the phone number on Farragut Road?"
"You mean with my Brooks Brothers voice?"
"That's it. Maybe you could use the same voice to find some phone company vice president who can figure out how to come up with a listing of calls to a certain number in Bay Ridge." He asked a few more questions and I explained what I was looking for and why I was unable to find it.
"Hang on," he said. "You sayin' they won't give it to you?"
"They don't have it to give. They've got all the calls logged but there's no way to sort them."
"Shit," he said. "First operator I call up, she tell me ain't no way she can tell me my number. Can't believe everything they tell you, man."
"No, I—"
"You somethin'," he said. "Call you up every damn day, say what you got for TJ, an' all the time you ain't got nothin'. How come you never tell me 'bout this before? You been silly, Willie!"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean if you don't tell me what you want, how I gonna give it to you? Told you that the first time I met you, walkin' around the Deuce not sayin' nothin' to nobody. Told you right then, said, tell me what you jonesin' on, I help you find it."
"I remember."
"So why you be dickin' around with the telephone company when you could be comin' to TJ?"
"You mean you know how to get the numbers from the phone company?"
"No, man. But I know how to get the Kongs."
"THE Kongs," he said. "Jimmy and David."