Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life."

Helen Exley

 
 
 
 
 
Tác giả: Lawrence Block
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Chapter 6
ack in my room I spread a sheaf of curling fax copies on my bed. They had evidently faxed the whole file, thirty-six pages of it. Some of them only had a few lines on them, but others were densely packed with information.
Shuffling through them, it struck me what a different proposition all this would have been in my own cop days. We didn't have copying machines, let alone fax. The only way to see Marie Gotteskind's file would have required traipsing out to Queens and going through it on the spot, with some anxious cop looking over your shoulder and trying to hurry you along.
Nowadays you just fed everything into a fax transmitter and it came out by sheer magic five or ten miles away— or on the other side of the world, for that matter. The original file never left the office where it was kept, and no unauthorized person snuck in for a peek at it, so nobody had to get uptight about a breach in security.
And I had all the time I needed to pore over the Gottes-kind file.
It's just as well I did because I had no clear idea what I was looking for. One thing that hasn't changed a bit since I got out of the Police Academy is the amount of paperwork the job entails. Whatever kind of cop you are, you spend less time doing things than you do establishing a record on paper of what you've done. Some of this is the usual bureaucratic horseshit and some comes under the general heading of covering your ass, but much of it is probably inescapable. Police work is a collective effort, with a variety of people contributing to even the simpler sort of investigation, and if it's not all written down somewhere nobody can get an overview of it and figure out what it amounts to.
I read everything, and when I got to the end I went back and pulled a few pieces of paper for a second look. One thing that became evident early on was the extraordinary similarity between the Gotteskind abduction and the way Francine Khoury was taken in Brooklyn. I noted the following points of similarity:
1. Both women were abducted from commercial streets.
2. Both women had parked cars nearby and were shopping on foot.
3. Both were seized by a pair of men.
4. In both instances, the men were described as being similar in height and weight, and were dressed alike. The Gotteskind kidnappers had worn khaki trousers and navy windbreakers.
5. Both women were carried off in trucks. The truck used in Woodhaven was described by several witnesses as a light blue van. One witness identified it specifically as a Ford, and supplied a partial plate number, but it hadn't led anywhere.
6. Several witnesses agreed that the body of the truck was lettered with the name of a household appliance firm. They variously identified the firm as P J Home Appliance, B & J Household Appliance, and variations on the foregoing. A second line read sales and service. There was no address, but witnesses reported that there was a phone number, although no one could supply it. A thorough investigation had failed to link the truck to any of the innumerable companies in the borough that sold and serviced home appliances, and the conclusion seemed warranted that the firm's name, like the plate number, was spurious.
7. Marie Gotteskind was twenty-eight years old and employed as a substitute teacher in the New York City primary schools. For three days, including the day of her abduction, she had filled in for a fourth-grade teacher in Ridgewood. She was about the same height as Francine Khoury and within a few pounds of her in weight, blond and light-complected where Francine was dark-haired and olive-skinned. There was no photograph in the file except for those taken at the scene in Forest Park, but testimony from acquaintances indicated that she was considered attractive.
There were differences. Marie Gotteskind was unmarried. She had had a few dates with a male teacher whom she'd met on an earlier substitute assignment, but their relationship does not seem to have amounted to much and his alibi for the time of her death was in any case unassailable.
Marie lived at home with her parents. Her father, a former steamfitter with a disability pension for a job-related injury, operated a small mail-order business from his home. Her mother helped him with the business and also served as a part-time bookkeeper for several neighborhood enterprises. Neither Marie nor either of her parents had any demonstrable connection to the drug subculture. Nor were they Arabs, or Phoenicians.
The medical examination had been detailed, of course, and there was a lot to report. Death had come as a result of multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, any of several of which would have been fatal. There was evidence of repeated sexual assault, with traces of semen in her anus, her vagina, and her mouth, as well as in one of the knife wounds. Forensic measurements indicated that at least two different knives had been used on her, and suggested that both could be kitchen knives, with one having a longer and wider blade than the other. An analysis of the semen indicated the presence of at least two assailants.
In addition to the knife wounds, the nude body showed multiple bruises indicating that the victim had been subjected to a beating.
Finally, and I missed this on first reading, the medical examiner's report supplied the information that the thumb and index finger of the victim's left hand had been severed. The two digits had been recovered, the index finger from her vagina, the thumb from her rectum.
Cute.
READING the file had a numbing, deadening effect on me. That's very likely why I missed the thumb-and-finger item first time through. The report of the woman's injuries and the image they conjured up of her last moments was more than the mind wanted to take in. Other entries in the file, interviews with parents and coworkers, had painted a picture of the living Marie Gotteskind, and the medical report took that living person and turned her into dead and grossly mistreated flesh.
I was sitting there, feeling drained and exhausted by what I had just read, when the phone rang. I answered it and a voice I knew said, "So where's it at, Matt?"
"Hey, TJ."
"How you doin'? You a hard man to reach. Be out all the time, goin' places, doin' things."
"I got your message but you didn't leave a number."
"Don't have a number. I was a drug dealer I might could have a beeper. You like it better that way?"
"If you were a dealer you'd have a cellular phone."
"Now you talkin'. Have me a long car with a phone in it, and just be sittin' in it thinkin' long thoughts and doin' long things. Man, I got to say it again, you hard to reach.
"Did you call more than once, TJ? I only got the one message."
"Well, see, I don't always like to waste the quarter."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you know, I got your phone figured. It's like those answering machines, how they pick up after three or four rings, whatever it is? Dude on the desk, he always lets your phone ring four times before he cuts in. And you just got the one room, so it ain't about to take you more than three rings to get to the phone, 'less you be in the bathroom or something."
"So you hang up after three rings."
"And get my quarter back. 'Less I want to leave a message, but why leave a message when I already left one? You come home an' there's a whole stack of messages, you think to yourself, 'This TJ, he musta tapped a parking meter, he got all these quarters he don't know what to do with.' "
I laughed.
"So you workin'?"
"As a matter of fact I am."
"Big job?"
"Fairly big."
"Any room in it for TJ?"
"Not as far as I can see."
"Man, you not lookin' hard enough! Must be something I could do, make up for some of the quarters I burn up callin' you. What kind of job is it, anyway? You not up against the Mafia, are you?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Glad to hear it, because those cats are bad, Tad. You see Goodfellas? Man, they nasty. Oh, damn, my quarter be runnin' out."
A recorded voice cut in, demanding five cents for a minute's worth of phone time.
I said, "Give me the number and I'll call you back."
"Can't."
"The number of the phone you're talking on."
"Can't," he said again. "Ain't no number on it. They takin' 'em off all the pay phones so the players can't get calls back on 'em. No problem, I got some change." The phone chimed as he dropped a coin in. "The dealers, they got certain pay phones where they know the number whether it shows there or not. So it still business as usual, only somebody like you wants to call somebody like me back, ain't no way to do it."
"It's a great system."
"It's cool. We still talkin', ain't we? Nobody stoppin' us doin' what we want to do. They just forcin' us to be resourceful."
"By putting in another quarter?"
"You got it, Matt. I be drawin' on my resources. That's what you call bein' resourceful."
"Where are you going to be tomorrow, TJ?"
"Where I be? Oh, I dunno. Maybe I fly to Paris on the Concorde. I ain't made up my mind yet." It struck me that he could take my ticket and go to Ireland, but he wasn't likely to have a passport. Nor did it seem probable that Ireland was ready for him, or he for Ireland. "Where I be," he said heavily. "I be on the fuckin' Deuce, man. Where else I gonna be?"
"I thought maybe we could get something to eat."
"What time?"
"Oh, I don't know. Say around twelve, twelve-thirty?"
"Which?"
"Twelve-thirty."
"That's twelve-thirty in the daytime or in the night?"
"Daytime. We'll have some lunch."
"Ain't no time of the day or night you can't have lunch," he said. "You want me to come by your hotel?"
"No," I said, "because there's a chance I'll have to cancel and I wouldn't have any way to let you know. So I don't want to hang you up. Pick a place on the Deuce and if I don't show up we'll make it another time."
"That's cool," he said. "You know the video arcade? Uptown side of the street, two, three doors from Eighth Avenue? There's the store with the switchknives in the window, man, I don't know how they get away with that—"
"They're sold in kit form."
"Yeah, an' they use it for an IQ test. You can't put the kit together, you have to go back an' do first grade all over again. You know the store I mean."
"Sure."
"Right next to it there's the entrance to the subway, and before you go down the stairs there's an entranceway to the video arcade. You know where it's at?"
"I have a hunch I can find it."
"Say twelve-thirty?"
"It's a date, Kate."
"Hey," he said. "You know somethin'? You learnin'."
oOo
I FELT better when I got off the phone with TJ. He usually had that effect on me. I made a note of our lunch date, then picked up the Gotteskind material again.
It was the same perpetrators. Had to be. The similarity of MO was too great to be coincidental, and the amputation and insertion of the thumb and forefinger looked like a rehearsal for the more extensive butchery they'd practiced on Francine Khoury.
But what did they do, go into hibernation? Lie low for a year?
It seemed unlikely. Sex-linked violence— serial rape, lust murder— seems to be addictive, like any strong drug that releases you momentarily from the prison of self. Marie Gotteskind's killers had pulled off a perfectly orchestrated abduction, only to repeat it a year later with very minor variations and, of course, a substantial profit motive. Why wait so long? What were they doing in the meantime?
Could there have been other abductions without anyone drawing a connection to the Gotteskind case? It was possible. The murder rate in the five boroughs is now over seven a day, and most of them don't get a lot of play in the media. Still, if you take a woman off a street in front of a bunch of witnesses, it makes the papers. If you've got a similar case sitting in an open file, you probably hear about it. And you almost have to draw a connection.
On the other hand, Francine Khoury had been snatched off the street in front of witnesses, and nobody in the press or the One-Twelve knew the first thing about it.
Maybe they really had lain low for a year. Maybe one or more of them had been in jail for all or part of that year, maybe a predilection for rape and murder had led to still worse crimes, like writing bad checks.
Or maybe they'd been active, but in a way that hadn't drawn any attention.
Either way, I knew something now that I had previously only suspected. They had done this before, for pleasure if not for profit. That lowered the odds against finding them, and at the same time it raised the stakes.
Because they'd do it again.
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