'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'.'
* * *
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
