The driver was working hard at hiding his amusement. 'Would you please shut up,' I said.
'Remember? You fell asleep.'
'That shows how safe I felt in your presence,' I said. 'Will you please shut up?'
'I will wrap myself in my teal-blue aura,' she said, 'and I will be very quiet.'
BEFORE I left the following morning she told me she had a good feeling about the calls from rape victims. 'Today's the day,' she said.
But she turned out to be wrong, teal-blue aura or not. There were no calls at all. When I talked to her that night she was glum about it. 'I guess that's it,' she said. 'Three Wednesday, one yesterday, and now nothing. I thought I was going to be a hero, come up with something significant.'
'Ninety-eight percent of an investigation is insignificant,' I said.
'You do everything you can think of because you don't know what will be useful. You must have been sensational on the phone because you got a very big response, but it's pointless to feel like a failure because you didn't turn up a living victim of the three stooges. You were looking for a needle in a haystack, and it's probably a haystack that didn't have a needle in it in the first place.'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean they probably didn't leave any witnesses. They probably killed every woman they victimized, so you were probably trying to find a woman who doesn't exist.'
'Well, if she doesn't exist,' she said, 'then I say to hell with her.'
TJ WAS calling in every day, sometimes more than once a day. I had given him fifty dollars to check out the two Brooklyn phones, and he couldn't have come out very far ahead on the deal, because what he hadn't spent on subways and buses he was sinking into telephone calls.
He got a better return on his time shilling for monte dealers or assisting a street peddler or doing any of the other street chores that combined to give him an income. But he still kept pestering me for work.
Saturday I wrote out a check for my rent and paid the other monthly bills that had come in— the phone bill, my credit card. Looking at the telephone bill made me think again of the calls made to Kenan Khoury's phone. I had made another attempt a few days before to find a phone-company employee who could figure out a way to supply that data, and had been told once again that it was unobtainable.
So that was on my mind when TJ called around ten-thirty. 'Give me some more phones to check out,'
he pleaded. 'The Bronx, Staten Island, anywhere.'
'I'll tell you what you can do for me,' I said. 'I'll give you a number and you tell me who called it.'
'Say what?'
'Oh, nothing.'
'No, you said somethin', man. Tell me what it was.'
'Maybe you could do it at that,' I said. 'Remember how you sweet-talked the operator out of the phone number on Farragut Road?'
'You mean with my Brooks Brothers voice?'
'That's it. Maybe you could use the same voice to find some phone company vice president who can figure out how to come up with a listing of calls to a certain number in Bay Ridge.' He asked a few more questions and I explained what I was looking for and why I was unable to find it.
'Hang on,' he said. 'You sayin' they won't give it to you?'
'They don't have it to give. They've got all the calls logged but there's no way to sort them.'
'Shit,' he said. 'First operator I call up, she tell me ain't no way she can tell me my number. Can't believe everything they tell you, man.'
'No, I—'
'You somethin',' he said. 'Call you up every damn day, say what you got for TJ, an' all the time you ain't got nothin'. How come you never tell me 'bout this before? You been silly, Willie!'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean if you don't tell me what you want, how I gonna give it to you? Told you that the first time I met you, walkin' around the Deuce not sayin' nothin' to nobody. Told you right then, said, tell me what you jonesin' on, I help you find it.'
'I remember.'
'So why you be dickin' around with the telephone company when you could be comin' to TJ?'
'You mean you know how to get the numbers from the phone company?'
'No, man. But I know how to get the Kongs.'
'THE Kongs,' he said. 'Jimmy and David.'
'They're brothers?'
'Ain't no family resemblance far as I can see. Jimmy Hong is Chinese and David King is Jewish. Least his father is Jewish. I think his mother might be Rican.'
'Why are they the Kongs?'
'Jimmy Hong and David King? Hong Kong and King Kong?'
