A Walk Among the Tombstones
A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel
Lawrence Block
for LYNNE
Baby, baby, naughty baby
Hush, you squalling thing, I say
Peace this moment, peace, or maybe
Bonaparte will pass this way
Baby, baby, he's a giant
Tall and black as Monmouth steeple
And he breakfasts, dines and suppers
Every day on naughty people
Baby, baby, if he hears you
As he gallops past the house
Limb from limb at once he'll tear you
Just as pussy tears a mouse
And he'll beat you, beat you, beat you
And he'll beat you all to pap
And he'll eat you, eat you, eat you
Every morsel snap snap snap!
ENGLISH LULLABY
Chapter 1
On the last Thursday in March, somewhere between ten-thirty and eleven in the morning, Francine Khoury told her husband she was going out for a while, she had marketing to do.
'Take my car,' he suggested. 'I'm not going anywhere.'
'It's too big,' she said. 'Time I took it, I felt like I was steering a boat.'
'Whatever you say,' he said.
The cars, his Buick Park Avenue and her Toyota Camry, shared the garage behind their house, a mock-Tudor structure of half-timbered stucco on Colonial Road between Seventy-eighth and Seventy-ninth streets, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn . She started up the Camry, backed out of the garage, triggered the remote unit to close the garage door, then backed all the way out to the street. At the first red light she popped a classical cassette into the tape deck. Beethoven, one of the late quartets.
She listened to jazz at home, it was Kenan's favorite music, but classical chamber music was what she played when she drove.
She was an attractive woman, five-six, 115 pounds, built large on top, narrow at the waist, trim in the hips. Dark hair, lustrous and curly, combed back off her face. Dark eyes, and aquiline nose, a generous, full-lipped mouth.
The mouth is always closed in photographs. She had, I understand, prominent upper incisors and a substantial overbite, and anxiety over this feature kept her from smiling much. In her wedding pictures she is beaming and radiant, but her teeth remain invisible.
Her complexion was olive, and her skin tanned deeply and readily.
