"So did I."
"I think she deserves better than the street."
"Everybody does," I said. "She may come out of this all right. If they get the guys and there's a trial, she could have her allotted fifteen minutes of fame. And she's got a lawyer who'll make sure that nobody gets her story without paying her for it."
"Maybe there'll be a TV movie."
"I wouldn't rule it out, although I don't think we can count on Debra Winger playing our friend."
"No, probably not. Oh, I got it. Are you with me on this? What you do, you get an actress to play her who's a postmastectomy patient in real life. I mean, are we talking high concept here or what? You see what a statement we'd be making?" She winked. "That's my show-biz persona. I bet you like my street act better."
"I'd call it a toss-up."
"Fair enough. Matt? Does it bother you to work on a case like this and then hand it over to the police?"
"No."
"Really?"
"Why should it? I couldn't justify keeping it to myself. The NYPD
has resources and manpower I don't have. I'd taken it as far as I could, that end of it, anyway. I'll still follow up the lead I got last night and see what I can turn up in Sunset Park."
"You're not telling the police about Sunset Park."
"No way to do that."
"No, Matt? I have a question."
"Go ahead."
"I don't know if you want to hear it, but I have to ask. Are you sure it's the same killers?"
"Has to be. A piece of wire used to amputate a breast? Once with Leila Alvarez, once with Pam Cassidy? Both victims dumped in cemeteries? Give me a break."
"I was assuming that the ones who did Pam also did the Alvarez girl. And the woman in Forest Park, the schoolteacher."
"Marie Gotteskind."
"But what about Francine Khoury? She was not dumped in a cemetery, she did not necessarily have a breast amputated with a garrote, and she was reportedly snatched by three men. If there was one thing Pam was positive of it was that there were only two men. Ray and the other one."
"There could have been just two with Khoury."
"You said—"
"I know what I said. Pam also said that they went from the driver's seat to the back of the truck and back again. Maybe it just looked as though there were three people because when you see two guys enter the back of a truck and then it pulls away you assume somebody was up front to drive it."
"Maybe."
"We know these guys did Gotteskind. Gotteskind and Alvarez are tied together by the business with the fingers, amputation and insertion, and Alvarez and Cassidy both had the breast cut off, so that means—"
"They're all three the same. All right, I follow that."
"Well, the Gotteskind eyewitnesses also said there were three men, two who did the snatching and one who drove. That could have been an illusion. Or they could have had three that day, and again the day they did Francine, but one guy was home with the flu the night they picked up Pam."
"Home jerking off," she said.
"Whatever. We could ask Pam if there were any references to another man. 'Mike would like her ass,'
something like that."
"Maybe they took her breast home for Mike."
" 'Hey, Mike you should have seen the one that got away.' "
"Spare me, will you? Do you think they'll get a decent description out of her?"
"I couldn't." She'd said she didn't remember what the two men looked like, that when she tried to picture them she saw wholly undefined faces, as if they'd been wearing nylon stockings as masks.
That had made the original investigation an exercise in futility when they gave her books full of sex-offender mug shots to pore over. She didn't know what faces she was looking for. They'd tried her with an Identi-Kit technician and that had been hopeless, too.
"When she was here," she said, "I kept thinking of Ray Galindez."
He was an NYPD cop and an artist, with an uncanny ability to hook up with a witness and extract a remarkable likeness. Two of his sketches, matted and framed, were on Elaine's bathroom wall.
"I had the same thought," I said, "but I don't know what he could get out of her. If he'd worked with her a day or two after it happened he might have got somewhere. Now it's been too long."
"What about hypnosis?"
"It's possible. She must have blocked the memory, and a hypnotist could possibly unblock her. I don't know that much about it. Juries don't necessarily trust it, and I'm not sure I do either."
"Why not?"
"I think hypnotized witnesses can create memories out of their imaginations because of a desire to please. I'm suspicious of a lot of the incest memories I hear about in meetings, memories that suddenly surface twenty or thirty years after the event. I'm sure some of them are real, but I get the sense that more than a few of them are summoned up out of the whole cloth because the patient wants to make her therapist happy."
"Sometimes it's real."
"No question. But sometimes it's not."
"Maybe. I'll grant you it's the trauma du jour these days. Pretty soon women without incest memories are going to start worrying that their fathers thought they were ugly. You want to play I'm a naughty little girl and you're my daddy?"
"I don't think so."
"You're no fun. You want to play I'm a hip slick and cool street hooker and you're sitting behind the wheel of your car?"
"Would I have to go rent a car?"
"We could pretend the couch is a car, but that might be a stretch.
What can we do that'll keep our relationship exciting and hot? I'd tie you up but I know you. You'd just go to sleep."
"Especially tonight."
"Uh-huh. We could pretend you're into deformities and I'm missing a breast."
"God forbid."
"Yeah, amen to that. I don't want to beshrei it, as my mother would say. You know from beshrei? I think it means inviting a Yiddish equivalent of hubris. 'Don't even say it, you might give God ideas.' "
"Well, don't."
"No. Honey? Do you want to just go to bed?"
"Now you're talking."
Chapter 15
Tuesday I slept late, and Elaine was gone when I woke up. A note on the kitchen table told me to stay as long as I wanted. I helped myself to breakfast and watched CNN for a while. Then I went out and walked around for an hour or so, winding up at the Citicorp Building in time for the noon meeting.
Afterward I went to a movie on Third Avenue, walked to the Frick and looked at the paintings, then took a bus down Lexington and caught a five-thirty meeting a block from Grand Central, commuters bracing themselves to pass up the club car.
The meeting was on the Eleventh Step, the one about seeking to know God's will through prayer and meditation, and most of the discussion was relentlessly spiritual. When I got out I decided to treat myself to a cab. Two sailed past me, and when a third one pulled up a woman in a tailored suit and flowing bow tie elbowed me out of the way and beat me to it. I hadn't done any praying or meditating, but I didn't have a whole lot of trouble figuring out God's will in the matter. He wanted me to go home by subway.
There were messages to call John Kelly, Drew Kaplan, and Kenan Khoury. That struck me as an awful lot of people with the same last initial, and I hadn't even heard from the Kongs yet. There was a fourth message from someone who hadn't left a name, just a number; perversely, that was the call I returned first.
I dialed the number, and instead of ringing it responded with a tone. I decided I'd been disconnected and hung up, and then I got it and dialed again, and when the tone sounded I punched in my phone number and hung up.
Within five minutes my phone rang. I picked it up and TJ said,
"Hey, Matt, my man. What's happenin'?"
"You got a beeper."
"Surprised you, huh? Man, I had five hundred dollars all at once.
What you 'spect me to do, buy a savings bond? They was havin' a special, you got the beeper and the first three months' service for a hundred an' ninety-nine dollars. You want one, I'll go to the store with you, make sure they treat you right."