conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for a book with the title 'A Walk Among the Tombstones'
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Walk Among the Tombstones
  The sky was bright with dawn by the time I got back to my hotel. I showered and went to bed, and after an hour or so I gave up and turned on the television set. I watched the morning news program on one of the networks. The secretary of state had just come back from a tour of the Middle East, and they had him on, and followed him with a Palestinian spokesman commenting on the possibilities for a lasting peace in the region.
  That brought my client to mind, if he'd ever been far from my thoughts, and when the next interview was with a recent Academy Award winner I hit the Mute button and called Kenan Khoury.
  He didn't answer, but I kept trying, calling every half hour or so until I got him around ten-thirty. "Just walked in the door," he said. "Scariest part of the trip was just now in the cab coming back from JFK. Driver was this maniac from Ghana with a diamond in his tooth and tribal scars on both cheeks, drove like dying in a traffic accident guaranteed you priority entry to heaven, green card included."
  He asked what it came to and I told him. "No problem," he said. "What did you do, front the expense money yourself? You shoulda asked Pete for it."
  I set the clock for that hour and got in bed. I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the map of Brooklyn, but before I could even begin to focus in on Sunset Park I was gone.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Walk Among the Tombstones
  The sky was bright with dawn by the time I got back to my hotel. I showered and went to bed, and after an hour or so I gave up and turned on the television set. I watched the morning news program on one of the networks. The secretary of state had just come back from a tour of the Middle East, and they had him on, and followed him with a Palestinian spokesman commenting on the possibilities for a lasting peace in the region.
  That brought my client to mind, if he'd ever been far from my thoughts, and when the next interview was with a recent Academy Award winner I hit the Mute button and called Kenan Khoury.
  He didn't answer, but I kept trying, calling every half hour or so until I got him around ten-thirty. "Just walked in the door," he said. "Scariest part of the trip was just now in the cab coming back from JFK. Driver was this maniac from Ghana with a diamond in his tooth and tribal scars on both cheeks, drove like dying in a traffic accident guaranteed you priority entry to heaven, green card included."
  He asked what it came to and I told him. "No problem," he said. "What did you do, front the expense money yourself? You shoulda asked Pete for it."
  I set the clock for that hour and got in bed.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He hadn't even thought about the daughter. Still, he'd made the call, and Landau had taken it as confirmation of a course of action he had adopted when he'd first sent Lucia off to Chichester. Instead of letting her take subways or buses, he'd arranged to have a car service pick her up every morning at seven-thirty and collect her in front of Chichester every afternoon at a quarter to three. If she wanted to go to a friend's house the car service would take her there, and she was instructed to call them when she wanted to come home. If she wanted to go anywhere in the neighborhood, she usually took the dog with her. The dog was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, and actually very gentle, but looked ferocious enough to constitute a powerful deterrent.
  Early that afternoon, the telephone rang in the office of Chichester Academy. A well-spoken gentleman explained that he was an assistant to Mr. Landau and was requesting that the school dismiss Ludmilla half an hour early because of a family emergency. "I've made arrangements with the car service," he assured the woman to whom he spoke, "and they'll have a vehicle waiting in front of the school at two-fifteen, although it probably will not be the car and driver she had this morning." And, he added, if there were any questions she was not to call Mr. Landau's residence; instead she could reach him, Mr. Pettibone, at a number he would give her now.
  She didn't have to call the number, because there was no problem following his request. She summoned Lucia (no one at school knew her as Ludmilla) to the office and told her she would be dismissed early. At ten minutes after two the woman looked out the window and saw that a dark green truck or van was parked directly in front of the school's entrance on Pineapple Street. It was quite unlike the late-model GM sedans that normally brought the girl in the morning and took her away in the afternoon, but it was clearly the right vehicle. The car service's name and address was plainly visible in white letters on its side. Chaverim Livery Service, with an address on Ocean Avenue. And the driver, who walked around the truck so that he could hold the door for Lucia, wore a blue blazer the way they always did, and had one of those caps.
  For her part, Lucia got into the van without hesitation. The driver closed the door, walked around the vehicle, got behind the wheel, and drove to the corner of Willow Street, at which point the woman stopped watching.
  At a quarter to three the rest of the school was dismissed, and a few minutes later Lucia's regular driver showed up in the gray Oldsmobile Regency Brougham in which he had driven Lucia to school that morning. He waited patiently at the curb, knowing that Lucia was routinely as much as fifteen minutes late leaving the building. He would have waited that long and longer without complaint, but one of Lucia's classmates recognized him and told him he must have made a mistake. "Because she was dismissed early," she said. "She got picked up like half an hour ago."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs. Start with the sentence 'A **day or** so later, an anonymous tip led officers of Brooklyn's Seventy-second Precinct to the house Albert Wallens had inherited upon his mother's death three years before'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A **day or** so later, an anonymous tip led officers of Brooklyn's Seventy-second Precinct to the house Albert Wallens had inherited upon his mother's death three years before. There they found Wallens, a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed construction worker with a record of sexual offenses and minor assault charges. Wallens was dead, with a length of piano wire fastened around his neck. In the same basement room they also found what appeared to be the mutilated corpse of another man, but thirty-six-year-old Raymond Joseph Callander, whose employment history included a seven-month hitch as a civilian employee with the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, was still alive. He was removed to Maimonides Medical Center where he regained consciousness but was unable to communicate, making simple cawing sounds until his death two days later.
  Evidence discovered in the Wallens house, and in two vehicles found in the adjacent garage, strongly implicated both men in several homicides which police at Brooklyn Homicide had recently determined to be linked, and to be the work of a team of serial killers. Several theories sprang up to explain the death scene, the most persuasive of which suggested that there had been a third man on the team and that he had slain his two partners and made his escape. Another conjecture, given less credence by anyone who had seen Callander or read his injury report at all closely, held that Callander had gone completely out of control, first killing his partner with a garrote, then indulging in a fitful orgy of self-mutilation. Considering that he'd somehow managed to divest himself of hands, feet, ears, eyes, and genitalia, "fitful" would barely begin to describe it.
  Drew Kaplan represented Pam Cassidy in her negotiations with a national tabloid. They ran her story, "I Lost a Breast to the Sunset Park Choppers," and paid her what Kaplan called "a high five-figure price." In a conversation conducted without her attorney present, I was able to assure Pam that Albert and Ray were indeed the men who had abducted her, and that there was no third man. "You mean Ray really did himself like that?" she wondered. Elaine told her there are some things we aren't meant to know.
  We went around the corner to the Flame and got a table by the window. "I was in the neighborhood," he said. "Thought I'd stop by, say hello. It's good to see you."
  Lawrence Block is a Grandmaster of the Mystery Writers of America, and has won a total of fourteen awards for his fiction, including one Edgar Award and two Shamus Awards for best novels for titles in the Matt Scudder series. He is also the creator of other great characters such as Bernie Rhodenbarr, Evan Tanner and Chip Harrison, and has written dozens of award-winning short stories. Lawrence Block lives in New York City.