'No,' I said. 'I stay sober in spite of you.'
'In spite of me or to spite me?'
'Maybe a little of both.'
'What's Peter's problem, anyway? Feeling sorry for himself because he can't drink or shoot up?'
'Snort.'
'Huh?'
'He stayed away from needles. But yeah, that's most of it. And he's pissed off at God.'
'Shit, who isn't?'
'Because what kind of a God would let something like that happen to a wonderful person like his sister-in- law?'
'God pulls that kind of shit all the time.'
'I know.'
'And maybe he had a reason. Maybe Jesus wants her for a sunbeam. Remember that song?'
'I don't think I ever heard it.'
'Well, I hope to God you never hear it from me, because I'd have to be drunk to sing it. Do you figure he was fucking her?'
'Do I figure who was fucking who?'
'Whom. Do you figure Peter was fucking the sister-in-law?'
'Jesus,' I said. 'Why would I think that? You've got a hell of a mind, you know that?'
'It's the people I hang around with.'
'It must be. No, I don't think he was. I think he's just feeling sad, and I think he wants to drink and take dope, and I hope he doesn't. That's all.'
I called Elaine and told her I was free for dinner, but she'd already made arrangements for her friend Monica to come over. She said they were going to order Chinese food in, and I was welcome to come over, that way they could order more dishes. I said I would pass.
'You're afraid it'll be an evening of girl talk,' she said. 'And you're probably right.'
Mick Ballou called while I was watching 60 Minutes and we talked for ten or twelve of them. I told him in the same breath that I had booked a trip to Ireland and that I'd had to cancel it. He was sorry I wasn't coming over but glad I'd found something to keep me busy.
I told him a little about what I was doing, but not the sort of person I was working for. He had no sympathy for drug dealers, and occasionally supplemented his income by invading their homes and taking their cash.
He asked about the weather and I said it had been raining all day.
He said it was always raining there, that he was finding it hard to recall what the sun looked like. Oh, and had I heard? They'd come up with evidence that Our Lord was Irish.
'Is that so?'
'It is,' he said. 'Consider the facts. He lived with his parents until He was twenty-nine years old. He went out drinking with the lads the last night of His life. He thought His mother was a virgin, and herself, a good woman, she thought He was God.'
THE week started slowly. I hammered away at the Khoury case, if you want to call it that. I managed to get the name of one of the officers who'd caught the Leila Alvarez homicide. She was the Brooklyn College student who'd been dumped in GreenWood Cemetery, and the case belonged not to the Seventy-second Precinct but to Brooklyn Homicide.
A Detective John Kelly had headed the investigation, but I had trouble reaching him and was reluctant to leave a name and number.
I saw Elaine Monday and she was disappointed that her phone hadn't been ringing off the hook with calls from rape victims. I told her she might not get any response, that it was like that sometimes, that you had to throw a lot of baited hooks in the water and sometimes you went a long time without a bite. And it was early, I said. It was unlikely the people she spoke to would have made any calls until the weekend was over.
'It was over today,' she reminded me. I said if they did make calls it might take them a while to reach people, and it might take the victims a couple of days to make up their minds to call.
'Or not to call,' she said.
She was more discouraged when Tuesday passed without a call.
When I spoke to her Wednesday evening she was excited. The good news was that three women had called her. The bad news was that none of the calls looked to have anything to do with the men who had killed Francine Khoury.
One was a woman who had been ambushed by a solitary assailant in the hallway of her apartment house. He had raped her and stolen her purse. Another had accepted a ride home from school with someone she took to be another student; he had shown her a knife and ordered her into the backseat, but she had been able to escape.
'He was a skinny kid and he was alone,' Elaine said, 'so I thought it was stretching it to figure him as a possibility. And the third call was date rape. Or pickup rape, I don't know what you'd call it. According to her, she and her girlfriend picked up these two guys in a bar in Sunnyside. They went for a ride in the guys' car and her girlfriend got carsick so they stopped the car so she could get out and vomit. And then they drove off and left her there. Can you believe that?'
