That about what you figured?"
"Just about."
"People who'd do something like this, take an innocent woman and turn her into cutlets, does it bother you what happens to them?"
I thought about it, but not for very long. "No," I said.
"We'll do what has to be done, me and my brother. You won't have a part of that."
"In other words I'd just be sentencing them to death."
He shook his head. "They sentenced themselves," he said. "By what they did. You're just helping play out the hand. What do you say?"
I hesitated.
He said, "You've got another problem, don't you? My profession."
"It's a factor," I said.
"That line about selling crack to schoolchildren. I don't, uh, set up shop in the schoolyard."
"I didn't figure you did."
"Properly speaking, I'm not a dealer. I'm what they call a trafficker.
You understand the distinction?"
"Sure," I said. "You're the big fish that manages to stay out of the nets."
He laughed. "I don't know that I'm big particularly. In certain respects the middle-level distributors are the biggest, do the most volume. I deal in weight, meaning I either bring product in in quantity or I buy it from the person who brings it in and turn it over to someone who sells smaller amounts. My customer probably does more business than I do because he's buying and selling all the time, where I may only do two or three deals a year."
"But you make out all right."
"I make out. It's hazardous, you've got the law to worry about and you've got people looking to rip you off. Where the risks are high the rewards are generally high also. And the business is there. People want the product."
"By product you mean cocaine."
"Actually I don't do much with coke. Most of my business is heroin. Some hash, but mostly heroin the past couple of years. Look, I'll tell you right out, I'm not gonna apologize for it. People take it, they get hooked, they rob their mother's purse, they break into houses, they OD
and die with needles in their arms, they share needles and get AIDS. I know the whole story. There's people who make guns, people who distill liquor, people who grow tobacco. How many people a year die of liquor and tobacco compared to the number die from drugs?"
"Alcohol and tobacco are legal."
"What difference does that make?"
"It makes some kind of difference. I'm not sure how much."
"Maybe. I don't see it myself. Either case, the product is dirty. It kills people, or it's the substance they use to kill themselves or each other. One thing in my favor, I don't advertise what I sell, I don't have lobbyists in Congress, I don't hire PR people to tell the public the shit I sell is good for them. The day people stop wanting drugs is the day I find something else to buy and sell, and I won't whine about it and look for the government to give me a federal subsidy, either."
Peter said, "It's still not lollipops you're selling, babe."
"No, it's not. The product's dirty. I never said it wasn't. But what I do I do clean. I don't screw people, I don't kill people, I deal fair and I'm careful who I deal with. That's why I'm alive and that's why I'm not in jail."
"Have you ever been?"
"No. I've never been arrested. So if that's a consideration, how it would look, you working for a known dope dealer—"
"That's not a consideration."
"Well, from an official standpoint, I'm not a known dealer. I won't say there's nobody in the Narcotics Squad or the DEA who knows who I am, but I don't have a record. I've never to my knowledge been the official subject of an investigation. My house isn't bugged and my phone's not tapped. I'd know if it was, I told you about that."
"Yes."
"Sit still a minute, I want to show you something." He went into another room and came back with a picture, a five-by-seven color shot in a silver frame. "That's at our wedding," he said. "That's two years ago, not quite two years, be two years in May."
He was in a tuxedo and she was all in white. He was smiling hugely, while she was not smiling, as I think I mentioned earlier. She was beaming, though, and you could see that she was radiant with happiness.
I didn't know what to say.
"I don't know what they did to her," he said. "That's one of the things I won't let myself think about. But they killed her and they butchered her, they made some kind of dirty joke out of her, and I have to do something about it because I'll die if I don't. I'd do it all myself if I could. In fact we tried, me and Petey, but we don't know what to do, we don't have the knowledge, we don't know the moves. The questions you asked before, the approach you took, if nothing else it showed me that this is an area where I don't know what I'm doing. So I want your help and I can pay you whatever I have to, money's not a problem, I've got plenty of money and I'll spend whatever I have to. And if you say no I'll either find someone else or try to do it myself because what the hell else am I gonna do?" He reached across the table and took the picture away from me and looked at it. "Jesus, what a perfect day that was," he said,
"and all the days since, and then it all turned to shit." He looked at me.
He said, "Yes, I'm a trafficker, a dope dealer, whatever you want to call it, and yes, it's my intention to kill these fucks. So that's all out on the table.
What do you say? Are you in or out?"
My best friend, the man I'd planned to join in Ireland, was a career criminal. According to legend, he had one night walked the streets of Hell's Kitchen carrying a bowler's bag from which he displayed the severed head of an enemy. I couldn't swear it happened, but more recently I'd been at his side in a cellar in Maspeth when he severed a man's hand with one blow of a cleaver. I'd had a gun in my hand that night, and I'd used it.
So if I was still very much a cop in some respects, in other ways I had undergone considerable change.
I'd long since swallowed the camel; why strain at the gnat?
"I'm in," I said.
Chapter 3
I got back to my hotel a little after nine. I'd had a long session with Kenan Khoury, filling pages of my notebook with names of friends and associates and family members. I'd gone to the garage to inspect the Toyota, and found the Beethoven cassette still in the tape deck. If there were any other clues in Francine's car, I couldn't spot them.
The other car, the gray Tempo used to deliver her segmented remains, was not available for inspection.
The kidnappers had parked it illegally, and sometime in the course of the weekend a tow truck from Traffic had showed up to haul it away.
I could have attempted to track it down, but what was the point?
It had surely been stolen for the occasion, and had probably been previously abandoned, given the condition of it. A police lab crew might have turned up something in the trunk or interior, stains or fibers or markings of some sort, that would point out a profitable line of investigation. But I didn't have the resources for that kind of inspection.
I'd be running all over Brooklyn to look at a car that wouldn't tell me a thing.
In the Buick the three of us traced a long, circuitous course, past the D'Agostino's and the Arabian market on Atlantic Avenue, then south to the first pay phone at Ocean and Farragut, then south on Flatbush and east on N to the second booth on Veterans Avenue. I didn't really have to see these sights, there's not a tremendous amount of information you can glean by staring at a public telephone, but I've always found it worthwhile to put in time on the scene, to walk the pavements and climb the stairs and see it all firsthand. It helps make it real.
It also gave me a way to take the Khourys through it again. In a police investigation, witnesses almost always complain about having to relate the same story over and over to a host of different people. It seems pointless to them, but there's a point to it. If you tell it enough times to enough different people, maybe you'll come up with something you've previously left out, or maybe one person will hear something that sailed past everybody else.