A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

by Lawrence Block

  “Never saw him before.”

  “I can’t think where I know him from.”

  “He looks like a cop.”

  “No,” I said. “Do you really think so?”

  “I’m not saying he’s a cop, I’m saying he has that look. You know who he looks like? It’s an actor who plays cops, I can’t think of his name. It’ll come to me.”

  “An actor who plays cops. They all play cops.”

  “Gene Hackman,” he said.

  I looked again. “Hackman’s older,” I said. “And thinner. This guy’s burly where Hackman’s sort of wiry. And Hackman’s got more hair, doesn’t he?”

  “Jesus help us,” he said. “I didn’t say he was Hackman. I said that’s who he looks like.”

  “If it was Hackman they’d have made him come up and take a bow.”

  “If it was Hackman’s fucking cousin they’d have made him take a bow, desperate as they are.”

  “But you’re right,” I said. “There’s a definite resemblance.”

  “Not that he’s the spitting image, mind you, but—”

  “But there’s a resemblance. That’s not why he looks familiar. I wonder where I know him from.”

  “One of your meetings, maybe.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “Unless that’s a beer he’s drinking. If he’s a member of your lot he wouldn’t be drinking a beer, would he now?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Although not all of your lot make it, do they?”

  “No, not all of us do.”

  “Well then, let’s hope it’s a Coke in his cup,” he said. “Or if it’s a beer, let’s pray he gives it to the lad.”

  DOMINGUEZ got the better of it in the fifth round. A lot of his big punches missed, but a couple got through and hurt Rasheed. He rallied nicely at the end but the round still clearly belonged to the Latin fighter.

  In the sixth, Rasheed took a straight right to the jaw and went down.

  It was a solid knockdown and it brought the crowd to its feet. Rasheed was up at five and took the mandatory eight count, and when the ref motioned for them to resume fighting Dominguez rushed in swinging for the fences. Rasheed was wobbly but he showed a lot of class, ducking, slipping punches, playing for time in clinches, fighting back gamely. The knockdown came fairly early in the round, but at the end of the three minutes Rasheed was still on his feet.

  “One more round,” Mick Ballou said.

  “No.”

  “Oh?”

  “He had his chance,” I said. “Like that fellow in the last bout, what was his name? The Irishman.”

  “The Irishman? What Irishman?”

  “McCann.”

  “Ah. Black Irish, that would be. You think Dominguez is another one who doesn’t know how to pull the trigger?”

  “He knows how, he just didn’t have what he needed. He threw too many punches. Punching tires you, especially when you don’t hit anything. I think the round took more out of him than it did out of Rasheed.”

  “You think it’ll go to the judges? They’ll give it to Pedro then, unless your man Chance put the fix in.”

  You wouldn’t fix a fight like that. There’s no betting. I said, “It won’t go to a decision. Rasheed’ll knock him out.”

  “Matt, you’re dreaming.”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Do you want to bet? I don’t want to bet money, not with you. What shall we bet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I looked over at the father and son. Something was hovering at the edge of thought, nagging at me.

  “If I win,” he said, “we’ll make a night of it and go to the eight o’clock mass at St. Bernard’s. The butchers’ mass.”

  “And if I win?”

  “Then we won’t go.”

  I laughed. “That’s a great bet,” I said. “We’re already not going, so what would I be winning?”

  “All right then,” he said. “If you win I’ll go to a meeting.”

  “A meeting?”

  “A fucking AA meeting.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I wouldn’t want to do it,” he said. “Isn’t that the fucking point? I’d be doing it because I lost the bet.”

  “But why would I want you to go to a meeting?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you ever want to go,” I said, “I’ll be happy to take you. But I certainly don’t want you to go on my account.”

  The father put his hand on the boy’s forehead and smoothed his hair back. There was something about the gesture that hit me like a hard right hand to the heart. Mick said something but I’d gone momentarily deaf to it. I had to ask him to repeat it.

  “Then I guess there’s no bet,” he said.

  “I guess not.”

  The bell rang. The fighters rose from their stools.

  “It’s just as well,” he said. “I think you’re right. I think that fucking Pedro punched himself out.”

  THAT’S how it turned out. It wasn’t that clear-cut in the seventh round because Dominguez was still strong enough to land a few shots that got the crowd cheering. But it was easier to get the crowd on its feet than to knock Rasheed off his, and he looked as strong as ever, and confident in the bargain. Late in the round he landed a short stiff right to the solar plexus and Mick and I looked at each other and nodded. Nobody had cheered, nobody had shouted, but that was the fight, and we knew it and so did Eldon Rasheed. I think Dominguez did, too.

  Between rounds Mick said, “I got to hand it to you. You saw something in the round before that I never saw. All those body punches, they’re money in the bank, aren’t they? They don’t look like anything at all, and then all at once your man has no legs under him. Speaking of legs.”

  The placard girl was letting us know that Round Eight was next.

  “She looks familiar, too,” I said.

  “You met her at a meeting,” he suggested.

  “Somehow I don’t think so.”

  “No, you’d remember her, wouldn’t you? A dream, then. You were with her in a dream.”

  “That’s more like it.” I looked from her to the man with the polka-dot tie, then back at her again. “They say that’s one of the ways you know you’re middle-aged,” I said. “When everybody you meet reminds you of somebody else.”

  “Is that what they say?”

  “Well, that’s one of the things they say,” I said, and they rang the bell for the eighth round. Two minutes into it Eldon Rasheed staggered Peter Dominguez with a brutal left hook to the liver. Dominguez’s hands fell and Rasheed dropped him with a right cross to the jaws.

  He was up at eight, but it must have been pure machismo that got him on his feet. Rasheed was all over him, and three shots to the midsection put Dominguez on the canvas again. This time the ref didn’t even bother to count. He stepped between the fighters and raised Rasheed’s arms overhead.

  Most of the same people who’d been rooting for a Dominguez knockout were on their feet again now, cheering for Rasheed.

  WE were standing next to Chance and Kid Bascomb, over by the blue corner, when the ring announcer quieted the crowd and told us what we already knew, that the referee had stopped the fight after two minutes and thirty-eight seconds of the eighth round, that the winner by a technical knockout was Eldon “the Bulldog” Rasheed. There were two more four-round bouts to follow, he added, and we wouldn’t want to miss a minute of the nonstop boxing action here at the New Maspeth Arena.

  The boxers competing in those two four-rounders had a thankless task ahead of them, because they were going to be playing to a near-empty house. The fights were on the card as insurance for FBCS. If the prelims had finished early, one of them would have been shoehorned in before the main event; if Rasheed had kayoed Dominguez in the second round, or been knocked out himself, there would be a bout or two left to fill up the television time slot.

  But it was almost eleven now, so neither of the remaining bouts would ma
ke it onto the screen. And just about everybody was heading for home, like baseball fans streaming out of Dodger Stadium in the seventh inning of a tie game.

  Richard Thurman was in the ring now, helping his cameraman pack up his gear. I didn’t see the placard girl anywhere. I didn’t see the father and son team from ringside, either, although I looked for them, thinking I’d point them out to Chance and see if he recognized the man.

  The hell with it. Nobody was paying me to figure out why some doting father looked familiar. My job was to get a line on Richard Thurman, and to find out whether or not he had murdered his wife.

  Chapter 2

  Back in November, Richard and Amanda Thurman had attended a small dinner party on Central Park West. They left the party shortly before midnight. It was a pleasant night; it had been unseasonably warm all week, so they elected to walk home.

  Their apartment occupied the entire top floor of a five-story brownstone on West Fifty-second Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. The ground floor housed an Italian restaurant, while a travel agent and a theatrical broker shared the second floor. The third and fourth floors were both residential. There were two apartments on the third floor, one housing a retired stage actress, the other a young stockbroker and a male model. The fourth floor held a single apartment; the tenants, a retired attorney and his wife, had flown to Florida on the first of the month and wouldn’t be back until the first week in May.

  When the Thurmans got home, somewhere between twelve and twelve-thirty, they reached the fourth-floor landing just as a pair of burglars emerged from the attorney’s empty apartment. The burglars, two large and muscular white males in their late twenties or early thirties, drew guns and herded the Thurmans into the apartment they had just ransacked. There they relieved Richard of his watch and wallet, took Amanda’s jewelry, and told the two that they were a pair of worthless yuppies and they deserved to die.

  They gave Richard Thurman a beating, tied him up and taped his mouth. Then they sexually assaulted his wife in front of him. Eventually one of them struck Richard over the head with what he believed was a crowbar or pry bar and he lost consciousness. When he came to the burglars were gone and his wife was lying on the floor across the room, nude and apparently unconscious.

  He rolled off the bed onto the floor and tried kicking at the floor, but it was thickly carpeted and he couldn’t make enough noise to attract the attention of the tenant in the apartment below. He knocked over a lamp but no one responded to the noise it made. He made his way over to where his wife was lying, hoping to arouse her, but she did not respond and did not appear to be breathing. Her skin felt cool to him and he was afraid that she was dead.

  He couldn’t free his hands and his mouth was still taped. It took some doing to loosen the tape. He tried shouting but no one responded. The windows were closed, of course, and the building was an old one, with thick walls and floors. He finally managed to upend a small table and knock a telephone down onto the floor. Also on the table was a metal tool that the attorney used to tamp down the tobacco in his pipe. Thurman gripped that between his teeth and used it to ring 911. He gave the operator his name and address and said he was afraid his wife was dead or dying. Then he passed out, and that’s how the police found him.

  THAT was on the second weekend in November, Saturday night and Sunday morning. On the last Tuesday in January, I was sitting in Jimmy Armstrong’s at two in the afternoon drinking a cup of coffee. Across the table from me sat a man about forty years old. He had short dark hair and a closely trimmed beard that was showing a little gray. He wore a brown tweed jacket over a beige turtleneck. He had an indoor complexion, no rare thing in the middle of a New York winter. His gaze, behind metal-framed eyeglasses, was thoughtful.

  “I think that bastard killed my sister,” he said. The words were angry but the voice was cool, the inflection level and neutral. “I think he murdered her and I think he’s getting away with it, and I don’t want that to happen.”

  Armstrong’s is at the corner of Tenth and Fifty-seventh. It’s been there a few years now, but before then it was on Ninth Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth, in premises now occupied by a Chinese restaurant. In those days I just about lived in the place. My hotel was right around the corner, and I ate one or more meals a day there, met clients there, and spent most of my evenings at my usual table in the back, talking with people or brooding by myself, drinking my bourbon neat or on the rocks or, as an aid to staying awake, mixing it with coffee.

  When I stopped drinking, Armstrong’s was at the top of my unwritten list of people, places, and things to avoid. That became easier to do when Jimmy lost his lease and moved a block west, out of my usual daily traffic pattern. I didn’t go there for a long time, and then a sober friend suggested we stop there for a late bite, and since then I’ve probably had half a dozen meals there. They say it’s a bad idea to hang out in ginmills when you’re trying to stay sober, but Armstrong’s felt more like a restaurant than a ginmill anyway, especially in its current incarnation with its exposed brick walls and potted ferns overhead. The background music was classical, and on weekend afternoons they had live trios playing chamber music. Not exactly your typical Hell’s Kitchen bucket of blood.

  When Lyman Warriner said he was down from Boston I suggested we meet at his hotel, but he was staying at a friend’s apartment. My own hotel room is tiny, and my lobby is too shabby to inspire confidence. So once again I had picked Jimmy’s saloon as a place to meet a prospective client. Now a baroque woodwind quintet played on the sound system while I drank coffee and Warriner sipped Earl Grey tea and accused Richard Thurman of murder.

  I asked him what the police had said.

  “The case is open.” He frowned. “That would seem to suggest that they’re working on it, but I gather it means the reverse, that they’ve largely abandoned hope of solving it.”

  “It’s not that cut-and-dried,” I said. “It usually means the investigation is no longer being actively pursued.”

  He nodded. “I spoke to a Detective Joseph Durkin. I gather the two of you are friends.”

  “We’re friendly.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “A nice distinction,” he said. “Detective Durkin didn’t say that he thought Richard was responsible for Amanda’s death, but it was the way he didn’t say it, if you know what I mean.”

  “I think so.”

  “I asked him if he could think of anything I might do to help resolve the situation. He said that everything that could be done through official channels had been done. It took me a minute before I realized he couldn’t specifically suggest I hire a private detective, but that was where he was leading me. I said, ‘Perhaps someone unofficial, say a private detective—‘ and he grinned as if to say that I’d caught on, that I was playing the game.”

  “He couldn’t come right out and say it.”

  “No. Nor, I gather, could he come right out and recommend your services. ‘As far as a recommendation’s concerned, all I’m really supposed to do is refer you to the Yellow Pages,’ he said. ‘Except I should say that there’s one fellow right here in the neighborhood who you won’t find in the book, on account of he’s unlicensed, which makes him very unofficial.’ You’re smiling.”

  “You do a good Joe Durkin imitation.”

  “Thank you. Pity there’s not much call for it. Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Are you sure? Almost everyone’s quit. I quit, but then I started again.” He seemed about to elaborate on that, then took out a Marlboro and lit it. He drew in the smoke as if it were something life-sustaining.

  He said, “Detective Durkin said you were unorthodox, even eccentric.”

  “Were those his words?”

  “They’ll do. He said your rates are arbitrary and capricious, and no, those weren’t his words either. He said you don’t furnish detailed reports or keep track of expenses.” He leaned forward. “I can live with that. He also said when you get your teeth i
n something you don’t let go, and that’s what I want. If that son of a bitch killed Amanda I want to know it.”

  “What makes you think he did?”

  “A feeling. I don’t suppose that’s terribly scientific.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

  “No.” He looked at his cigarette. “I never liked him,” he said. “I tried to, because Amanda loved him, or was in love with him, or whatever you want to call it. But it’s difficult to like someone who clearly dislikes you, or at least I found it difficult.”

  “Thurman disliked you?”

  “Immediately and automatically. I’m gay.”

  “And that’s why he disliked you?”

  “He may have had other reasons, but my sexual orientation was enough to place me beyond the pale of his circle of potential friends. Have you ever seen Thurman?”

  “Just his photo in the newspapers.”

  “You didn’t seem surprised when I told you I was gay. You knew right away, didn’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t say I knew. It seemed likely.”

  “On the basis of my appearance. I’m not setting traps for you, Matthew. Is it all right if I call you Matthew?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Or do you prefer Matt?”

  “Either one.”

  “And call me Lyman. My point is that I look gay, whatever that means, although to people who haven’t been around many homosexuals my own gayness, if you will, is probably a good deal less evident. Well. My take on Richard Thurman, based on his appearance, is that he’s so deep in the closet he can’t see over the coats.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I don’t know that he’s ever acted out, and he may very well not be consciously aware of it, but I think he prefers men. Sexually. And dislikes openly gay men because he fears we’re sisters under the skin.”

  THE waitress came over and poured me more coffee. She asked Warriner if he wanted more hot water for his tea. He told her he would indeed like more hot water, and a fresh tea bag to go with it.