A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

by Lawrence Block

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was trying for off-Broadway, but I think I may have achieved off-off-Broadway.”

  We had good seats down front, but the theater was too small to have any bad seats. I don’t remember the title of the play, but it was about homelessness, and the playwright was against it. One of the actors, Harley Ziegler, was a regular at Keep It Simple, an AA group that meets evenings at St. Paul the Apostle, just a couple of blocks from my hotel. In the play Harley was a wino who lived in a cardboard packing case. He gave a convincing performance, and why not? A few years ago he’d been playing the role in real life.

  We went backstage afterward to congratulate Harley and ran into half a dozen other people I knew from meetings. They invited us to join them for coffee. Instead we walked ten blocks up Ninth to Paris Green, a restaurant we both liked. I had the swordfish steak and Elaine ordered linguini al pesto.

  “I don’t know about you,” I said. “It seems to me you wear a lot of leather for a heterosexual vegetarian.”

  “It’s one of those wacky little inconsistencies wherein lies the secret of my charm.”

  “I was wondering about that.”

  “Now you know.”

  “Now I know. There was a woman killed half a block from here a few months ago. She and her husband interrupted burglars in their downstairs neighbors’ apartment and she wound up raped and murdered.”

  “I remember the case.”

  “Well, it’s my case now. Her brother hired me yesterday, he thinks the husband did it. The couple whose apartment it was, the downstairs neighbors, he’s this Jewish lawyer, retired, lots of dough, and she didn’t have any furs stolen. You know why?”

  “She was wearing them all at once.”

  “Uh-uh. She’s an animal-rights activist.”

  “Oh yeah? Good for her.”

  “I suppose. I wonder if she wears leather shoes.”

  “Probably. Who cares?” She leaned forward. “Look,” she said, “you could refuse to eat bread because yeast give their lives to make it. You could pass up antibiotics because what right do we have to murder germs? So she wears leather but she doesn’t wear fur. So what?”

  “Well—”

  “Besides,” she said, “leather’s neat and fur’s tacky.”

  “Well, that settles it.”

  “Good. Did the husband do it?”

  “I don’t know. I walked past the building earlier today. I can point it out to you later, it’s on our way if I walk you home. Maybe you’ll pick up some vibrations, solve the case just by walking past the murder site.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. He had a million and a half reasons to kill her.”

  “A million and a half—”

  “Dollars,” I supplied. “Between insurance and her own holdings.” I told her about the Thurmans and what I’d learned from Joe Durkin and Lyman Warriner. “I’m not sure what I can do that the police haven’t already done,” I said. “Just poke around, I guess. Knock on doors, talk to people. Be nice if I could find out he’s been having an affair, but of course that was the first thing Durkin looked for and he couldn’t turn up a thing.”

  “Maybe he’s got a boyfriend.”

  “That would fit with my client’s theory, but gay people have a tendency to think the whole world is gay.”

  “While you and I know the whole world is morose.”

  “Uh-huh. You want to go to Maspeth tomorrow night?”

  “Speaking of what? Moroseness?”

  “No, I just—”

  “Or should it be morosity? Because Maspeth does sound pretty morose, although I shouldn’t say that because I don’t actually think I’ve ever been there. What’s in Maspeth?” I told her and she said, “I don’t like boxing much. It’s not a moral issue, I don’t care if two grown men want to stand around and hit each other, but I’d just as soon change the channel. Anyway, I’ve got a class tomorrow night.”

  “What is it this semester?”

  “Contemporary Latin American Fiction. All the books I’ve been telling myself I really ought to read, and now I have to.”

  In the fall she’d studied urban architecture, and I’d gone with her a couple of times to look at buildings.

  “You’ll be missing the architecture of Maspeth,” I said. “Although I haven’t really got a good reason to go myself, to tell you the truth. I don’t have to travel that far to get a look at him. He lives right here in the neighborhood and his office is at Forty-eighth and Sixth. I think I’m just looking for an excuse to go to the fights. If the New Maspeth Arena had squash matches instead of boxing I’d probably stay home.”

  “You don’t like squash?”

  “I like Orange Squash okay. I’ve never actually seen squash played, so what do I know? Maybe I’d like it.”

  “Maybe you would. I met a fellow once who’s a nationally ranked squash player. A clinical psychologist from Schenectady, he was in town for a tournament at the New York Athletic Club. I never saw him play, though.”

  “I’ll let you know if I run into him in Maspeth.”

  “Well, you never know. It’s a small world. Did you say the Thurmans lived just a block from here?”

  “Half a block.”

  “Maybe they used to come here. Maybe Gary knows them.” She frowned. “Knew them. Knows him, knew her.”

  “Maybe. Let’s ask him.”

  “You ask,” she said. “I can’t seem to get the verbs right.”

  * * *

  AFTER we’d settled the tab we went over to the bar. Gary was behind it, a tall lanky man with a droll manner and a beard that hung from his lower jaw like an oriole’s nest. He said it was good to see us and asked when I would have some work for him. I told him it was hard to say.

  “Once this gentleman entrusted me with a matter of grave importance,” he told Elaine. “It was an undercover assignment and I acquitted myself well.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said.

  I asked about Richard and Amanda Thurman. They came in occasionally, he said, sometimes with another couple, sometimes just the two of them. “He’d have a vodka mart before dinner,” he said. “She’d have a glass of wine. Sometimes he’d come in by himself and have a quick beer at the bar. I don’t remember the brand. Bud Light, Coors Light. Something light.”

  “Has he been in since the murder?”

  “Only once that I saw him. A week, two weeks ago, he and another fellow came in and had dinner one night. That’s the only time I’ve seen him since it happened. He lives very near here, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Just halfway down the block.” He leaned over the bar, dropped his voice. “What’s the story? Is there a suspicion of foul play?”

  “There’d have to be, don’t you think? The woman was raped and strangled.”

  “You know what I mean. Did he do it?”

  “What do you think? Does he look like a killer to you?”

  “I’ve been in New York too long,” he said. “Everybody looks like a killer to me.”

  * * *

  ON our way out Elaine said, “You know who might like to go to the fights tomorrow? Mick Ballou.”

  “He might at that. You want to stop at Grogan’s for a minute?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I like Mick.”

  He was there, and glad to see us, and enthusiastic at the idea of driving out to Maspeth to watch grown men stand around hitting each other. We didn’t stay long at Grogan’s, and when we left I flagged a cab, so we didn’t walk past the building where Amanda Thurman had died, to her husband’s horror or with his complicity.

  I stayed the night at Elaine’s apartment, and I spent the next day starting to poke into the corners of Richard Thurman’s life. I was back at my hotel in time to watch the five o’clock news on CNN. Then I took a shower and got dressed, and when I went downstairs Mick’s silver Cadillac was parked out front next to a fire hydrant.

  “Maspeth,” he said. I asked him if he knew ho
w to get there. “I do,” he said. “There was a man who had a factory out there, a Romanian Jew he was. He had a dozen women working for him, putting together bits of metal and plastic, making staple removers.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Say you’ve stapled some papers together and you want to take them apart. You take one of his things and it nips the staple and draws it right out. He had some women assembling the creatures and others packing them a dozen to a box and shipping them all over the country.” He sighed. “He was a gambler, though, and he borrowed money and couldn’t pay it back.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ah, that’s a long story,” he said. “I’ll have to tell it to you one of these days.”

  NOW, five hours later, we were heading back to Manhattan on the Queensboro Bridge. He hadn’t said anything more about the factory owner in Maspeth. Instead, I was telling him about the Cable TV executive.

  He said, “The things people do to each other.”

  He had done his share. One of the things he’d done, according to neighborhood legend, was kill a man named Farrelly and carry his head around in a bowling bag, lugging it in and out of a dozen Hell’s Kitchen saloons. Some people said he never opened the bag, just told everybody what it contained, but there were others who swore they’d been there to see him haul out the head by the hair, saying, “Will you look at poor Paddy Farrelly? And isn’t he the ugliest bastard you ever saw?”

  In the newspapers they say he’s known as the Butcher Boy, but it’s only the newspapers that call him that, just as no one but a ring announcer ever called Eldon Rasheed the Bulldog. The Farrelly story probably has something to do with the sobriquet, but so does the bloodstained butcher’s apron Mick likes to wear.

  The apron belonged to his father. The senior Ballou had come over from France and worked cutting up carcasses in the wholesale meat markets on West Fourteenth Street. Mick’s mother was Irish, and he got his speech from her and his looks from the old man.

  He is a big man, tall and heavily built, with a massive monolithic quality to him that suggests a prehistoric monument, a stone head from Easter Island. His own head is like a boulder, the skin scarred by acne and violence, the cheeks starting to show the broken capillaries that years of drinking will earn you. His eyes are a startling green.

  He is a hard drinker, a career criminal, and a man with blood on his hands as well as his apron, and there are people, he and I among them, who wonder at our friendship. I would be hard put to explain it, but neither could I easily explain my relationship with Elaine. It may be that all friendships are ultimately inexplicable, although some of them are harder to figure than others.

  MICK invited me back to Grogan’s for coffee or a Coke but I begged off. He admitted he was tired himself. “But one night next week we’ll make a night of it,” he said. “And at closing time we’ll lock the doors and sit in the dark telling old stories.”

  “That sounds good to me.”

  “And go to mass in the morning.”

  “I don’t know about that part of it,” I said. “But the rest sounds good.”

  He dropped me in front of the Northwestern and I stopped at the desk on my way upstairs. There weren’t any messages. I went on up and went to bed.

  Waiting for sleep to come I found myself remembering the man I’d seen in Maspeth, the father who’d sat with his son in the front row of the center section. I knew I’d seen him somewhere and I still couldn’t think where. The boy wasn’t familiar to me, just the father.

  Lying there in the dark it struck me that what was remarkable was not that the man looked familiar. I see people every day whom I sense I’ve seen before, and no wonder; New York teems with people, and thousands upon thousands of them pass through my field of vision every day, on the street, down in the subway, at a ballpark or in a theater or, say, a sports arena in Queens. No, what was unusual was not the sense of recognition but the urgency of the whole thing. For some reason I evidently felt it was very important that I place this man, that I figure out who he was and how I knew him.

  Sitting there, his arm around the boy, his hand gripping the kid’s shoulder, his other hand pointing at this and at that as he explained the ring action. And then another image, the hand moving to the boy’s forehead, moving to smooth the light brown hair.

  I focused on the image, wondering what could invest it with such urgency, and my mind fastened on it and then wandered down some other corridor, and I slept.

  I awoke a few hours later when a garbage-collection crew made a noisy job of picking up at the restaurant next door. I used the bathroom and came back to bed. Images flickered in my mind’s eye. The placard girl, tossing her head, straightening her shoulders. The father, his face animated. The hand on the boy’s forehead. The girl. The father. The girl. The hand moving, smoothing the hair—

  Christ!

  I sat up. My heart was pounding, my mouth dry. I had trouble catching my breath.

  I reached over, switched on the bedside lamp. I looked at the clock. It was a quarter to four, but I was done sleeping for the night.

  Chapter 5

  Six months earlier, on an oppressively hot Tuesday night around the middle of July, I was at my regular evening meeting in the basement of St. Paul’s. I know it was a Tuesday because I had undertaken a six-month commitment to help stack the chairs after the Tuesday meetings. The theory holds that service of that sort helps you keep sober. I don’t know about that. My own feeling is that not drinking keeps you sober, but stacking chairs probably doesn’t do any harm. It’s hard to pick up a drink while you’ve got a chair in each hand.

  I don’t remember anything specific about the meeting itself, but during the break a fellow named Will came up to me and said he’d like to talk with me after the meeting. I said that would be fine, but I wouldn’t be able to leave right away, that I had to hang around for a few minutes to put the chairs away.

  The meeting resumed, ending at ten o’clock with the Lord’s Prayer, and the cleanup went quicker than usual because Will gave me a hand with the chairs. When we were done I asked him if he wanted to go someplace for coffee.

  “No, I have to get home,” he said. “This won’t take that long, anyway. You’re a detective, right?”

  “More or less.”

  “And you used to be a cop. I heard you qualify when I was a month or so sober. Look, would you do me a favor? Would you take a look at this?”

  He handed me a brown paper bag folded to make a compact parcel. I opened it and took out a videocassette in one of those semi-rigid translucent plastic cases the rental shops use. The label identified the picture as The Dirty Dozen.

  I looked at it and then at Will. He was around forty, and he did some sort of work that involved computers. He was sober six months at the time, he’d come in right after the Christmas holidays, and I’d heard him qualify once. I knew his drinking story but not much about his personal life.

  “I know the movie,” I said. “I must have seen it four or five times.”

  “You’ve never seen this version.”

  “How is it different?”

  “Just take my word for it. Or rather don’t take my word, take the film home and look at it. You have a VCR, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh,” he said, and he looked lost.

  “If you could tell me what’s so special about the movie—”

  “No, I don’t want to say anything, I want you to see it without any preconceptions. Shit.” I gave him time to sort it out. “I’d say to come over to my apartment but I really can’t do that tonight. Do you know anybody who has a VCR you could use?”

  “I can think of someone.”

  “Great. Will you look at it, Matt? And I’ll be here tomorrow night, and we can talk about it then.”

  “You want me to look at it tonight?”

  “Could you do that?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll try.”

  I had planned on joining the crowd at the Flame
for coffee, but instead I went back to my hotel and called Elaine. “If this doesn’t work just say so,” I said, “but a fellow just gave me a movie and said I had to watch it tonight.”

  “Somebody gave you a movie?”

  “You know, a cassette.”

  “Oh, I get it. And you want to watch it on my whatchamacallit.”

  “Right.”

  “My VCR.”

  “If you’re sure you don’t mind.”

  “I can stand it if you can. The only thing is I’m a mess, I don’t have makeup on.”

  “I didn’t know you wore makeup,” I said.

  “Is that right?”

  “I thought that was natural beauty.”

  “Oh, boy,” she said. “Some detective.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  “The hell you will,” she said. “You’ll give me fifteen minutes to gild the lily or I’ll tell the doorman to throw you out on your ass.”

  * * *

  IT was more like half an hour by the time I walked over there. Elaine lives on East Fifty-first Street between First and Second Avenues. Her apartment is on the sixteenth floor, and from her living-room window you can look out across the East River at a fairly panoramic view of the borough of Queens. I suppose you could see Maspeth if you knew where to look for it.

  She owns her apartment. The building went co-op a few years ago and she bought it. She also owns a fair amount of rental property, two-family houses and apartment buildings, some but not all of them in Queens. She has other investments as well, and she could probably live decently off her investment income if she were to retire from her profession. But she hasn’t chosen to do so, not yet.

  She’s a call girl. We met years ago, when I was a cop with a gold shield in my wallet and a house and a wife and kids in Syosset, which is far out on Long Island on the other side of Queens, much too remote to be seen from Elaine’s window. She and I developed a relationship based, I suppose, on mutual need, which may be the basis of most if not all relationships, if you look deeply enough.