'I never even thought of that.'
'Because there are parts of Brooklyn where they get funny when a black kid walks down the street, even if he is conservatively dressed in high-top sneakers and a Raiders jacket, and I just know he has one of those haircuts.'
'He's got a sort of geometric design cut into the hair on the back of his neck.'
'I thought he might. I hope he comes back alive.'
'He'll be all right.'
Later in the evening she said, 'Matt, you were just making work for him, weren't you? TJ, I mean.'
'No, he's saving me a trip. I would have had to run out there myself sooner or later, or catch a ride with one of the Khourys.'
'Why? Couldn't you use your old cop tricks to wheedle the number out of the operator? Or look it up in a reverse directory?'
'You have to know a number to look it up in a reverse directory. A reverse directory has phones listed numerically, and you look up the number and it tells you the location.'
'Oh.'
'But there is a book that lists pay phones by location, yes. And yes, I could call an operator and pass myself off as a police officer in order to obtain a number.'
'So you were just being nice to TJ.'
'Nice? According to you I was sending him to his death. No, I wasn't just being nice. Looking in the book or conning the operator would give me the number of the pay phone, but it wouldn't tell me if the number's posted on the phone. That's what I'm trying to find out.'
'Oh,' she said. And, a few minutes later, 'Why?'
'Why what?'
'Why do you care if the number's posted on the phone? What difference does it make?'
'I don't know that it does make a difference. But the kidnappers knew to call those phones. If the number's posted, well, then there was nothing special about their knowledge. If not, they found out one way or another.'
'By conning the operator or looking in the book.'
'Which would mean that they know how to con an operator, or where to find a list of pay phones. I don't know what it would mean.
Probably nothing. Maybe I want to get the information because it's the only thing about the phones I can find out.'
'What do you mean?'
'It's been nagging at me,' I said. 'Not what I sent TJ for, that's easy enough to find out with or without his help. But I was sitting up last night and it struck me that the only contact with the kidnappers was phone contact. That was the only trace they left of themselves. The abduction itself was clean as a whistle. A few people saw them, and even more people saw them take that schoolteacher off Jamaica Avenue, but they didn't leave anything you could use to reel them in. But they did make some phone calls. They made four or five calls to Khoury's house in Bay Ridge.'
'There's no way to trace them, is there? After the connection is broken?'
'There ought to be,' I said. 'I was on the phone yesterday for over an hour with different phone-company personnel. I found out a lot of things about how the phones work. Every call you make is logged.'
'Even local calls?'
'Uh-huh. That's how they know how many message units you use in each billing period. It's not like a gas meter where they're just keeping track of the running total. Each call gets recorded and charged to your account.'
'How long do they keep that data?'
'Sixty days.'
'So you could get a list—'
'Of all the calls made from a particular number. That's how the data is organized. Say I'm Kenan Khoury. I call up, I say I need to know what calls were made from my phone on a given day, and they can give me a printout with the date and time and duration of every call I made.'
'But that's not what you want.'
'No, it's not. What I want is the calls made to Khoury's phone, but that's not how they log them, because there's no point. They've got the technology to tell you what number's calling you before you even pick up the phone. They can mount a little LED gadget on your phone that'll display the number of the calling party and you can decide whether or not you want to talk.'
'That's not available yet, is it?'
'No, not in New York, and it's controversial. It would probably cut down on the nuisance calls and put a lot of telephone perverts out of business, but the police are afraid it'd keep a lot of people from phoning in anonymous tips, because they'd suddenly be a lot less anonymous.'
'If it were available now, and if Khoury had had it on his phone—'
'Then we'd know what phones the kidnappers called from. They probably used pay phones, they've been professional enough in other respects, but at least we'd know which pay phones.'
