"There are people who wouldn't think it was such a bad idea."
"You're talking about half the people in this room," he said, "and the other half are attorneys themselves.
But what the hell. Kaplan and I agreed to keep this dark as far as the press is concerned. He said he was sure you'd go along."
"Of course."
"If we had a good sketch of the two perps it'd be different, but I put her together with an artist and the best we could come up with is they each got two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. She's not too sure about ears, thinks they had two apiece but doesn't want to commit herself. Be like running a picture of a smile button on page five of the Daily News:
'Have You Seen This Man?' What we got is linkage of three cases which we're now officially treating as serial homicide, but do you see any advantage in making it public? Besides scaring the shit out of people, what do you accomplish?"
* * *
WE didn't linger over lunch. He had to be back by two to testify in the trial of a drug-related homicide, which was the sort of thing that kept him from ever getting his desk clear. "And it's hard to keep on giving a shit if they kill each other," he said, "or to break your back trying to nail them for it. I wish to hell they'd legalize all that shit, and I honest to Christ never thought I'd hear myself say that."
"I never thought I'd hear any cop say it."
"You hear it all the time now. Cops, DAs, everybody. There's still DEA guys playing the same old tune.
'We're winning the war on drugs. Give us the tools and we can do the job.' I don't know, maybe they believe it, but you're better off believing in the Tooth Fairy. Least that way you might wind up with a quarter under your pillow."
"How can you rationalize making crack legal?"
"I know, it's a pisser. My all-time favorite is angel dust. An ordinary peaceable guy'll go get himself dusted, and he goes straight into a blackout and acts out violently. Then he wakes up hours later and somebody's dead and he doesn't remember a thing, he can't even tell you if he enjoyed the high. Would I like to see them selling dust at the corner candy store? Jesus, I can't say I would, but would they move any more of it that way than they do right now, selling it on the street in front of the candy store?"
"I don't know."
"Neither does anybody else. As a matter of fact they're not selling that much angel dust these days, but it's not because people are going away for it. Crack's taking a lot of the dust market. So there's good news from the world of drugs, sports fans. Crack is helping us win that war."
We split the check, and on the sidewalk we shook hands. I agreed to get in touch if I thought of anything he ought to know about, and he said he'd keep me posted if they got any kind of a break in the case. "I can tell you there'll be some manpower on it," he said. "These are guys we really want to take off the street."
I HAD told Kenan Khoury I'd be out later that afternoon, so I headed in that direction. The Docket is on Joralemon Street, where Brooklyn Heights butts up against Cobble Hill. I walked east to Court Street and down Court to Atlantic, passing Drew Kaplan's law office and the Syrian place I'd gone to with Peter Khoury. I turned on Atlantic so that I could pass Ayoub's and visualize the kidnapping in situ, which was another Latin phrase Drew could put in the basket with pro bono. I thought I'd take a bus south, but when I got to Fourth Avenue a bus was just pulling away from the curb, and it was a beautiful spring day anyway and I was enjoying the walk.
I walked for a couple of hours. I never consciously planned on walking all the way to Bay Ridge, but that's what I wound up doing. At first I just thought I'd walk eight or ten blocks and then catch the first bus that came along. By the time I got to the first of the numbered streets I realized I was only about a mile from Green-Wood Cemetery. I cut over to Fifth Avenue and walked to the cemetery and went in, strolling for ten or fifteen minutes among the graves. The grass was bright the way it never is except in early spring, and there were a lot of spring bulbs in bloom around the headstones, along with other flowers that had been placed in urns.
The cemetery covers a vast expanse of ground and I had no idea in what section of it Leila Alvarez had been lost and found, although there may well have been some indication in the news story. If so I had long since forgotten, and what difference did it make, anyway? I wasn't going to psych out anything by tuning in to the vibrations emanating from the patch of grass on which she'd lain. I'm willing to believe that some people can operate that way, that they can use willow twigs to find lost objects and missing children, even that they can see auras that escape my vision (although I wasn't sure I'd grant such powers to Danny Boy's latest girlfriend). But I couldn't.
Still, just being in a place might jog a thought loose, allow a mental connection that might otherwise never be made. Who knows how the process works?
Maybe I went there looking for some kind of connection to the Alvarez girl. Maybe I just wanted to spend a few minutes walking on green grass, and looking at the flowers.
I ENTERED the cemetery at Twenty-fifth Street and left it half a mile south at Thirty-fourth. By this point I had made my way through all of Park Slope and was on the northern edge of the Sunset Park section, and just a couple of blocks from the small park that gave the neighborhood its name.
I walked to the park, and across it. Then, one by one, I made my way to all six of the pay phones that had been used to call the Khoury house, starting with the one on New Utrecht Avenue at Forty-first Street.
The one I was most interested in was on Fifth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth. That was the phone they had used twice, the one that thus figured to be closest to their base of operations. Unlike the other phones, it was not located on the street but just inside the entrance of a twenty-four-hour laundromat.
There were two women in the place, both of them fat. One was folding laundry while the other sat in a chair tipped back against the concrete-block wall and read a copy of People magazine with Sandra Dee's picture on the cover. Neither of them paid any attention to the other, or to me. I dropped a quarter in the phone and called Elaine.
When she picked up I said, "Do all laundromats have telephones? Is it a regular thing, are you always going to find a pay phone in a laundromat?"
"Do you have any idea how many years I've been waiting for you to ask me that?"
"Well?"
"It's flattering that you think I know everything, but I have to tell you something. I haven't set foot inside a laundromat in years. In fact I'm not sure I've ever been in one. We have machines in the basement. So I can't answer your question, but I can ask you one. Why?"
"Two of the calls to Khoury the night of the kidnapping came from a laundromat pay phone in Sunset Park."
"And you're there right now. You're calling me from that very phone."
"Right."
"And? Why does it matter if other laundromats have phones? Don't tell me, I'll figure it out for myself. I can't figure it out for myself.
Why?"
"I was thinking they'd have to live very close for it to occur to them to use this phone. You can't see it from the street, so unless you lived within a block or two of it you wouldn't think of it when you needed to make a phone call. Unless every laundromat in the world has a phone."
"Well, I don't know about laundromats. There's no phone in our basement. What do you do about laundry?"
"Me? There's a laundry around the corner."
"They have a phone?"
"I don't know. I drop it off in the morning and pick it up at night, if I remember. They do everything. I give it to them dirty and it comes back clean."
"I bet they don't separate colors."
"Huh?"
"Never mind."
I left the laundromat and had a café con leche at the Cuban lunch counter at the corner. They'd talked on that phone, the sons of bitches. I was that close to them.