A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

by Lawrence Block

  “A pet peeve,” he told me. “Coffee drinkers get free refills. Tea drinkers get free hot water, but if you want another tea bag they charge you for a second cup. Tea costs them less than coffee anyway.” He sighed. “If I were a lawyer,” he said, “I might mount a class-action suit. I’m joking, of course, but somewhere in our litigious society, someone is probably doing just that.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “She was pregnant, you know. Almost two months. She’d been to the doctor.”

  “It was in the papers.”

  “She’s my only sibling. So the bloodline dies out when I go. I keep thinking that should trouble me, but I don’t know that it does. What does trouble me is the idea of Amanda dying at the hands of her husband, and of him getting away with it. And of not knowing for sure. If I knew for sure—”

  “What?”

  “It would trouble me less.”

  The waitress brought his tea. He dunked the fresh tea bag. I asked him what might have motivated Thurman to kill Amanda.

  “Money,” he said. “She had some.”

  “How much?”

  “Our father made a lot of money. In real estate. Mother found ways to piss away a good deal of it, but there was still some left when she died.”

  “When was that?”

  “Eight years ago. When the will cleared probate Amanda and I each inherited slightly in excess of six hundred thousand dollars. I rather doubt that she spent it all.”

  BY the time we were through it was getting close to five o’clock and the bar business was beginning to pick up as the first of the Happy Hour set arrived. I had filled several pages in my pocket notebook and had begun turning down coffee refills. Lyman Warriner had switched from tea to beer and was halfway through a tall glass of Prior dark.

  It was time to set a fee, and as always I didn’t know how much to ask for. I gathered that he could afford whatever I charged him but that didn’t really enter into my calculations. The number I settled on was $2500, and he didn’t ask me how I’d arrived there, just took out a checkbook and uncapped a fountain pen. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen one.

  He said, “Matthew Scudder? Two t’s, two d’s?” I nodded and he wrote out the check and waved it to dry the ink. I told him that he might have a refund coming if things went faster than I expected, or that I might ask for more money if it seemed appropriate. He nodded. He didn’t seem terribly concerned about this.

  I took the check, and he said, “I just want to know, that’s all.”

  “That might be the most you can hope for. Finding out that he did it and turning up something that’ll stand up in court are two different things. You could wind up with your suspicions confirmed and your brother-in-law still getting away with it.”

  “You don’t have to prove anything to a jury, Matthew. Just prove it to me.”

  I didn’t feel that I could let that go. I said, “It sounds as though you’re thinking of taking matters into your own hands.”

  “I’ve already done that, haven’t I? Hiring a private detective. Not letting matters take their own course, not allowing the mills of God to grind in their traditionally slow fashion.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be part of something that winds up with you on trial for Richard Thurman’s murder.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I won’t pretend it hasn’t occurred to me. But I honestly don’t think I would do it. I don’t think it’s my style.”

  “That’s just as well.”

  “Is it? I wonder.” He motioned for the waitress, gave her twenty dollars and waved away change. Our check couldn’t have come to more than a quarter of that, but we’d taken up a table for three hours. He said, “If he killed her, he was exceedingly stupid.”

  “Murder is always stupid.”

  “Do you really think so? I’m not sure I agree, but you’re more the expert than I. No, my point is that he acted prematurely. He should have waited.”

  “Why?”

  “More money. Don’t forget, I inherited the same amount Amanda did, and I can assure you I haven’t pissed it away. Amanda would have been my heir, and the beneficiary of my insurance.” He took out a cigarette, put it back in the pack. “I wouldn’t have had anyone else to leave it to,” he said. “My lover died a year and a half ago, of a four-letter disease.” He smiled thinly. “Not gout. The other one.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m HIV-positive,” he said. “I’ve known for several years. I lied to Amanda. I told her I’d been tested and I was negative, so I had nothing to worry about.” His eyes sought mine. “That seemed like an ethical lie, don’t you think? Since I wasn’t about to have sex with her, why burden her with the truth?” He took out the cigarette but didn’t light it. “Besides,” he said, “there was a chance I might not get sick. Having the antibody may not necessarily mean having the virus. Well, scratch that. The first telltale purple blotch appeared this past August. KS. That’s Kaposi’s sarcoma.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not the short-term death sentence it was a year or two ago. I could live a long time. I could live ten years, even more.” He lit the cigarette. “But,” he said, “somehow I have a feeling that’s not going to happen.”

  He stood up, got his topcoat from the rack. I reached for mine and followed him out to the street. A cab came along right away and he hailed it. He opened the rear door, then turned to me once more.

  “I hadn’t got around to telling Amanda,” he said. “I thought I’d tell her at Thanksgiving, but of course by then it was too late. So she didn’t know, and of course he wouldn’t have known, so he couldn’t have realized the financial advantage in delaying her murder.” He threw his cigarette away. “It’s ironic,” he said, “isn’t it? If I’d told her I was dying, she might be alive today.”

  Chapter 3

  I got up the next morning and put Warriner’s check in the bank and drew some walking-around money while I was at it. We’d had a little snow over the weekend but most of it was gone now, with just a little gray residue left at the curbs. It was cold out, but there wasn’t much wind and it wasn’t a bad day for the middle of winter.

  I walked over to Midtown North on West Fifty-fourth, hoping to catch Joe Durkin, but he wasn’t there. I left word for him to call me and walked on down to the main library at Forty-second and Fifth. I spent a couple of hours reading everything I could find about the murder of Amanda Warriner Thurman. While I was at it I looked for her and her husband in the New York Times Index over the past ten years. I read their wedding announcement, which had appeared four years ago September. She would already have come into her inheritance by then.

  I had already learned when they were married from Warriner, but it never hurts to confirm things a client tells you. The announcement furnished me with other information Warriner hadn’t given me—the names of Thurman’s parents and others in the wedding party, the schools he’d attended, the jobs he’d held before he went with Five Borough Cable.

  Nothing I turned up told me that he had or hadn’t murdered his wife, but I hadn’t figured to solve the case with two hours of library research.

  I called Midtown North from a pay phone on the corner. Joe hadn’t come back. I had a Sabrett hot dog and a knish for lunch and walked over to the Swedish church on Forty-eighth, where there’s a twelve-thirty meeting on weekdays. The speaker was a commuter who lived with his family on Long Island and worked for one of the Big Six accounting firms. He’d been sober ten months and couldn’t get over how wonderful it was.

  “I got your message,” Durkin said. “I tried you at your hotel but they said you were out.”

  “I was on my way there now,” I said. “I thought I’d take a chance, see if I’d catch you in.”

  “Well, today’s your lucky day, Matt. Have a seat.”

  “A fellow came to see me yesterday,” I said. “Lyman Warriner.”

  “The brother. I figured he’d call you. You gonna do som
ething for him?”

  “If I can,” I said. I had palmed a hundred-dollar bill and I tucked it between his fingers. “I appreciate the referral.”

  We were alone in the office, so he felt free to unfold the bill and look at it. “It’s a good one,” I assured him. “I was there when they printed it.”

  “Now I feel better,” he said. “No, what I was just thinking is I shouldn’t even take this from you. You want to know why? Because it’s not just a case of throwing a couple of bucks your way and keeping the citizen happy. I’m glad you took the guy on. I’d love to see you do him some good.”

  “You think Thurman did his wife?”

  “Do I think? I fucking know it.”

  “How?”

  He considered the question. “I don’t know,” he said. “Cop instinct. How’s that?”

  “It sounds good to me. Between your cop instinct and Lyman’s feminine intuition, I figure Thurman’s lucky to be walking around free.”

  “Have you met the guy, Matt?”

  “No.”

  “See if you don’t read him the same way I did. He’s one phony son of a bitch, I swear to God. I caught that case, I was the first person in there after the blues who responded to the 911 call. I saw him then, when he was still in shock and bleeding from a head wound and with his face red and raw from where he’d worked the tape off of his mouth. I saw him I don’t know how many times over the next couple of weeks. Matt, he never rang true. I just did not buy that he was sorry she was dead.”

  “That wouldn’t necessarily mean he killed her.”

  “That’s a point. I’ve known killers who were sorry their victim was dead and I suppose it works the other way around. And I’m not setting myself up as Joseph Durkin the Human Polygraph. I can’t always tell when somebody’s lying. But with him it’s easy. If his lips are moving, he’s feeding you a line of shit.”

  “All by himself?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t see how. The woman was raped fore and aft with signs of forced entry. Semen deposited vaginally was definitely not from the husband. Different blood type.”

  “And in back?”

  “No semen deposited anally. Maybe the guy in back was practicing safe sex.”

  “Rape in the modern age,” I said.

  “Well, it’s all those leaflets the Surgeon General mailed out, raising the level of public consciousness and all. Anyway, from the looks of it you got your two burglars just the way the husband told it.”

  “Any other physical evidence besides semen?”

  “Short and curlies. Seem to be two types, one that’s definitely not the husband’s, the other that’s a possible. The thing is, you can’t tell too much from pubic hair. You can tell both samples are from male Caucasians but that’s about all you can get. Plus it doesn’t prove anything if some of the hairs are Thurman’s, because they were married, for Christ’s sake, and it’s not unheard of to carry your husband’s pubic hair around in your bush for a day or two.”

  I thought for a moment. I said, “In order for Thurman to have done it solo—”

  “Couldn’t happen.”

  “Sure it could. All he needed was some foreign semen and pubic hair.”

  “How would he come by that? Blow a sailor and spit in a Glad bag?”

  I thought fleetingly of Lyman Warriner’s perception of Thurman as a closet case. “I suppose that’s as good a way as any,” I said. “I’m just running through what’s remotely possible and what isn’t. One way or another he obtained specimens of foreign semen and hair. He went to the party with his wife, came home—”

  “Climbed three flights of stairs and told her to wait a minute while he forced entry to the Gottschalk apartment. ‘Look, honey, I learned this neat way to open doors without the key.’ ”

  “The door was forced?”

  “Jimmied.”

  “That could have been done after.”

  “After what?”

  “After he’d killed her and before he called 911. Say he had a key to the Gottschalk place.”

  “That’s not what the Gottschalks say.”

  “He could have had one without them knowing about it.”

  “They had a couple of locks on the door.”

  “He could have had a couple of keys. ‘Hang on, honey, I promised Roy and Irma I’d water the plants.’ ”

  “That’s not their names. Alfred Gottschalk, that’s the lawyer. I forget the wife’s name.”

  “ ‘I promised Alfred and Whatsername I’d water the plants.’ ”

  “At one in the morning?”

  “What’s the difference? Maybe he says he wants to borrow a book from the Gottschalks, something he’s been wanting to read. Maybe they’re both a little giddy from the party and he tells her they’ll sneak into the Gottschalk apartment and screw in their bed.”

  “ ‘It’ll be exciting, honey, like before we were married.’ ”

  “That’s the idea. He gets her in there, he kills her, he makes it look like rape, he plants the physical evidence, the sperm and the pubic hairs. Did they find anything under her nails, anything to suggest she scratched anybody?”

  “No, but he didn’t say anything about her fighting them off. And you had two of them, so one could hold her hands while the other made whoopee.”

  “Let’s get back to the idea of him doing it all by himself. He kills her and fakes the rape. He sets the stage in the Gottschalk apartment, makes it look like the place was burglarized. Did you get the Gottschalks to come up and see what was missing?”

  He nodded. “He came up, Alfred. He said his wife’s been ill, she’s supposed to avoid unnecessary travel. They keep a couple hundred dollars cash in the refrigerator for emergencies, and that was gone. There was some jewelry missing, heirloom stuff, cuff links and rings he’d inherited but doesn’t wear. Jewelry of hers, but he couldn’t describe it because he didn’t know what she’d taken to Florida and what was in the safe-deposit box. The good stuff was all in the bank or in Florida, so he didn’t expect the loss would amount to much, but he’d have to have Ruth make up a detailed list of what was missing. That’s the wife’s name, Ruth. I knew it would come to me.”

  “What about furs?”

  “She doesn’t own any. She’s an animal-rights activist. Not that she’d need a fur coat in the first place, spending six months and a day in Florida every year.”

  “Six months and a day?”

  “Minimum, so they qualify as Florida residents for tax purposes. There’s no state income tax in Florida.”

  “I thought he was retired.”

  “Well, he still has an income. From investments and so on.”

  “Anyway, no furs,” I said. “Anything bulky? A stereo, a television set?”

  “Nothing. There were two TVs, a big rear-projection set in the living room and a smaller model in the back bedroom. They unplugged the bedroom set and moved it into the living room but left it there. The way it reads, they were planning on taking the set and they either forgot it in the excitement or decided not to risk looking suspicious, not with a dead woman in the apartment.”

  “Assuming they knew she was dead.”

  “They beat her face in and wrapped her panty hose around her neck. They damn well knew she was in worse shape than before she ran into them.”

  “So they took some cash and some jewelry.”

  “That’s what it looks like. That’s all Gottschalk could come up with. Thing is, Matt, they turned the apartment upside down.”

  “The lab crew?”

  “No, the burglars. They gave it a very thorough toss and made a mess doing it. Every drawer dumped, books off the shelves, that kind of thing. Not like they were searching for a secret stash, no mattresses slashed or cushions cut open, but a very thorough job all the same. I would guess they were looking for cash, and not a couple hundred dollars in the butter-keeper compartment in the refrigerator.”

  “What did Gottschalk say?”

  “What could he say? ‘I had a h
undred grand in unreported cash and the bastards found it.’ He said there wasn’t anything really valuable in the apartment, except for some artwork, and they never touched that. He had some framed prints, signed and numbered stuff, Matisse and Chagall and I forget what else, and he had a floater policy covering them. I think the value of all the art came to something like eighty grand. The thieves took some of the stuff off the wall, probably looking for a wall safe, but they didn’t steal any of it.”

  “Say he did it himself,” I said.

  “We’re back to that, huh? Go ahead.”

  “The place is really ransacked, so it looks like a bona fide burglary, but all he has to stash is a wad of cash and a handful of jewelry. Did you search him?”

  “Thurman?” He shook his head. “Man’s all beat up, hands tied behind his back, his wife’s lying there dead, how are you gonna strip search him, look up his asshole for somebody’s platinum cuff links? Anyway, your scenario, he could have stowed everything in his own apartment.”

  “I was just going to say that.”

  “Still with your scenario, he gets into the Gottschalk place with a key, two keys, whatever it takes, he does his wife, he fakes the rape scene, he steals the cash and the jewelry and takes them upstairs, rolls them up in a pair of socks and stashes them in his sock drawer. Then he comes back downstairs and uses a pry bar on the door, makes it look like forced entry. Then I suppose he goes back upstairs and stashes the pry bar, because we didn’t find it in the Gottschalk place.”

  “Did you search Thurman’s apartment?”

  “That we did,” he said. “With his permission. I told him there was a good possibility the burglars had started in his place and worked their way down, which I knew they hadn’t because there was no sign of forced entry at the Thurman apartment. Of course they could have got in from the fire escape, but the hell with what they could have done, because nobody had been in there. But I searched it just the same, looking for anything that might have been lifted from downstairs.”

  “And you didn’t find anything.”

  “Not a thing, but I don’t know what that proves. I didn’t have a chance to fine-comb the place. And he could have added the Gottschalks’ jewelry to his and his wife’s jewelry boxes and I wouldn’t have known the difference, because I didn’t know what I was looking for. And the cash, a couple hundred dollars in cash, he could have stuck that in his fucking wallet.”