The addresses were all in Brooklyn. And they were all in a far more compact area than the whole Khoury case covered. The kidnap and ransom delivery had begun in Bay Ridge, moved to Atlantic Avenue in Cobble Hill, ranged to Flatbush and Farragut and then way over to Veterans Avenue, and then swung back to the drop-off of the remains in Bay Ridge again. That covered a fair chunk of the borough, while their previous activities were spread all over Brooklyn and Queens. Their home base could be anywhere.
But the pay phones weren't that far apart. I would have to sit down with the list and a map to plot their positions precisely, but I could tell already that they were all in the same general area, on the west side of Brooklyn, north of Khoury's house in Bay Ridge and south of Green-Wood Cemetery.
Where they'd dumped Leila Alvarez.
One phone was on Sixtieth Street, another on New Utrecht at Forty-first, so it's not as though they were within walking distance of each other. They had left the house and driven around to make those calls. But it stood to reason that home base was somewhere in that neighborhood, and probably not too far from the one phone they'd used a second time. It was all over, they were all done, all that remained was to rub salt in Kenan Khoury's wounds, so why drive ten blocks out of the way if you didn't have to? Why not use the handiest pay phone of the lot?
Which happened to be on Fifth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets.
* * *
I DIDN'T go into all of that with the boys, and indeed a lot of my own ruminations had to wait until later on. I gave the Kongs five hundred dollars each and told them how much I appreciated what they'd done.
They insisted it was fun, even the boring part. Jimmy said he had a headache and a bad case of hacker's wrist, but that it was worth it.
'You two go down first,' I said. 'Put your ties and jackets on and just nonchalant your way out the front door. I'll want to make sure there's nothing traceable in the room, and I guess I'll have to stop at the desk and settle up what I owe for the phone. I left a fifty-dollar deposit but we were hooked into it for over seven hours, and I don't have any idea what the charges are going to be.'
'Oh, my,' David said. 'He just doesn't get it.'
'It's amazing,' Jimmy said.
'Huh? What don't I get?'
'You don't get to pay any phone charges,' Jimmy said. 'First thing I did once we were hooked up was bypass the desk. We could have called Shanghai and there wouldn't be any record of it at the desk.' He grinned. 'You might as well let them keep the deposit, though. Because King had about thirty dollars'
worth of macadamia nuts from the mini-bar.'
'Which means thirty macadamia nuts at a dollar each,' David said.
'But if I were you,' Jimmy said, 'I'd just go home.'
AFTER they left I paid TJ. He fanned the sheaf of bills I handed him, looked at me, looked at them again, at me again, and said, 'This here for me?'
'Would have been no game without you. You brought the bat and the ball.'
'I figured a hundred,' he said. 'I didn't do much, just sat around, but you was payin' out a lot of bread and I figured you wasn't about to leave me out. How much I got here?'
'Five,' I said.
'I knew this'd pay off,' he said. 'Me an' you. I like this detectin'
business. I be resourceful, I good at it, and I like it.'
'It doesn't usually pay this well.'
'Don't make no difference. Man, what other line of work I gone find lets me use all the shit I know?'
'So you want to be a detective when you grow up, TJ?'
'Ain't gonna wait that long,' he said. 'Gonna be one now. And that's where it's at, Matt.'
I told him his first assignment was to get out of the hotel without drawing the wrong kind of attention from the hotel staff. 'It would be easier if you were dressed like the Kongs,' I said, 'but we work with what we've got. I think you and I should walk out together.'
'White guy your age and a black teenager? You know what they be thinking.'
'Uh-huh, and they can shake their heads over it all they want. But if you walk out by yourself they'll think you've been burgling the rooms, and they might not let you walk.'
'Yeah, you right,' he said, 'but you not lookin' at all the possibilities. Room's all paid for, right?
Checkout time's like noon. An' I see where you live, man, and I don't mean to be dissin' you, but your room ain't this nice.'
'No, it's not. It doesn't cost me a hundred and sixty dollars a night, either.'
'Well, this room ain't gonna cost me a dime, Simon, an' I gonna take me a hot shower an' dry myself on three towels an' get in that bed an' sleep six or seven hours. 'Cause this room ain't just better than where you live, it's like ten times better than where I live.'
'Oh.'
'So I gone hang the 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the knob and kick back an' be undisturbed, like. Then noon comes an' I walk outta here an'
nobody look at me twice, nice young man like me, musta just come an'
