A Walk Among the Tombstones

some money. He didn't want to take it, but the guy's got two kids in college so how can he not take it? It wasn't that much.'

'How much?'

'Two grand. That's pretty low-budget for a funeral, isn't it? I mean you can spend more than that on a casket.' He shook his head. 'I got the ashes in a tin can in the safe downstairs. I don't know what to do with them. No idea what she would have wanted. We never discussed it.

Jesus, she was twenty-four years old. Nine years younger than me, nine years less a month. We were married two years.'

'No children.'

'No. We were gonna wait one more year and then— oh, Jesus, this is terrible. It bother you if I have a drink?'

'No.'

'Petey says the same. Fuck it, I'm not having one. I had one pop Thursday afternoon after I talked on the phone with them and I haven't had anything since. I get the urge and I just push it away. You know why?'

'Why?'

'Because I want to feel this. You think I did the wrong thing?

Taking her to Lou's place, cremating her.

You think that was wrong?'

'I think it was unlawful.'

'Yeah, well, I wasn't too worried about that aspect of it.'

'I know you weren't. You were just trying to do what was decent.

But in the process you destroyed evidence. Dead bodies hold a great deal of information for someone who knows what to look for. When you reduce a body to ashes and bone chips, all that information is lost.'

'Does it matter?'

'It might be helpful to know how she died.'

'I don't care how. All I want to know is who.'

'One might lead to the other.'

'So you think I did the wrong thing. Jesus, I couldn't call the cops, hand them a sack full of cuts of meat, say, 'This is my wife, take good care of her.' I never call the cops, I'm in a business where you don't, but if I had opened the trunk of the Tempo and she was there in one piece, dead but intact, maybe, maybe, I'd have reported it. But this way—'

'I understand.'

'But you think I did the wrong thing.'

'You did what you had to do,' Peter said.

Isn't that what everybody always does? I said, 'I don't know a lot about right and wrong. I probably would have done the same thing, if I'd had a cousin with a crematorium in his back room. But what I would have done is beside the point. You did what you did. The question is, where do you go from here?'

'Where?'

'That's the question.'

IT wasn't the only question. I asked a great many questions, and I asked most of them more than once. I took them both back and forth over their story, and I wrote down a lot of notes in my notebook. It began to look as though the segmented remains of Francine Khoury constituted the only piece of tangible evidence in the entire affair, and they had gone up in smoke.

When I finally closed my notebook the two Khoury brothers sat waiting for a word from me. 'On the face of it,' I said, 'they look pretty safe. They made their play and carried it off without giving you a clue who they are. If they left tracks anywhere, they haven't shown up yet. It's possible someone at the supermarket or the place onAtlantic Avenue recognized one of them or caught a license number, and it's worth an intensive investigation to try to turn up such a witness, but he's no more than hypothetical at this point. The odds are that there won't be a witness, or that what he saw won't lead anywhere.'

'You're saying we got no chance.'

'No,' I said. 'That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying an investigation has to do something besides work with the clues they left behind. One starting point lies in the fact that they got away with almost half a million dollars. There's two things they could do, and either one could spotlight them.'

Kenan thought about it. 'Spend it's one of them,' he said. 'What's the other?'

'Talk about it. Crooks talk all the time, especially when they've got something to brag about, and sometimes they talk to people who'll happily sell them out. The trick is to get the word out so those people know who the buyer is.'

'You've got an idea how to do that?'

'I've got a lot of ideas,' I admitted. 'Earlier you wanted to know to what extent I was still a cop. I don't know, but I still approach this kind of problem the way I did when I carried a badge, turning it this way and that until I can get some kind of grip on it. In a case like this one I can immediately see several different lines of investigation to pursue.

There's every chance in the world that none of them will lead anywhere, but they're still the approaches that ought to be tried.'