A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

by Lawrence Block

  There was a possibility, though, that Rubber Man and Leather Woman had made other films, separately or together. I didn’t know if I would recognize them but I thought I might, especially if they appeared again in the same costumes. So that’s what I was looking for, if indeed I was looking for anything.

  On the uptown side of Forty-second Street, perhaps five doors east of Eighth Avenue, there was a hole-in-the-wall shop much like the others, except that it seemed to specialize in sadomasochistic material. It had all the other specialties as well, of course, but its S-and-M section was proportionately larger. There were videos ranging from $19.98 all the way up to $100, and there were photo magazines with names like Tit Torture.

  I looked at all of the videocassettes, including the ones made in Japan and Germany and the aggressively amateurish ones with crude computer-printed labels. Before I was halfway through I had ceased really looking for Rubber Man and his heartless partner. I wasn’t looking for anything. I was just letting myself soak up this world to which I’d been so abruptly introduced. It had always been here, less than a mile from where I lived, and I had always known of it, but I’d never let myself sink into it before. I’d never had reason to.

  I got out of there, finally. I must have been in the shop for close to an hour, looking at everything, buying nothing. If this bothered the clerk he kept his annoyance to himself. He was a dark-skinned young man from the Indian subcontinent, and he kept his face expressionless and never said a word. In fact no one in the shop ever spoke, not he, not I, not any of the other customers. Everyone was careful to avoid eye contact, browsing, buying or not buying, and moving into and through and out of the store as if genuinely unaware of anyone else’s presence. Now and then the door would open and close, now and then there’d be a jingly sound as the clerk counted out change into somebody’s palm, quarters for the video booths at the back. Otherwise all was silence.

  * * *

  I took a shower as soon as I got back to my hotel. That helped, but I still carried the aura of Times Square around with me. I went to a meeting that night and took another shower and went to bed. In the morning I had a light breakfast and read the paper, and then I walked down Eighth Avenue and turned left on the Deuce.

  The same clerk was on duty, but if he recognized me he kept it to himself. I bought ten dollars’ worth of quarters and went into one of the little booths in back and locked the door. It doesn’t matter which booth you select because each contains a video terminal hooked into a single sixteen-channel closed-circuit system. You can switch from channel to channel at will. It’s like watching television at home, except the programming is different and a quarter buys you a scant thirty seconds of viewing time.

  I stayed in there until my quarters were gone. I watched men and women do various things to one another, each some variation on an overall theme of punishment and pain. Some of the victims seemed to be enjoying the proceedings, and none looked to be in any real distress. They were performers, willing volunteers, troupers putting on a show.

  Nothing that I saw was much like what I’d seen at Elaine’s.

  When I got out of there I was ten dollars poorer and felt about that many years older. It was hot and humid out, it had been like that all week, and I wiped sweat off my forehead and wondered what I was doing on Forty-second Street and why I’d come there. They didn’t have anything I wanted.

  But I couldn’t seem to get off the block. I wasn’t drawn to any other porno stores, nor did I want any of the services the street had to offer. I didn’t want to buy drugs or hire a sexual partner. I didn’t want to watch a kung fu movie or buy basketball sneakers or electronic equipment or a straw hat with a two-inch brim. I could have bought a switchblade knife (“Sold only in kit form; assembly may be illegal in some states”) or some fake photo ID, printed while-U-wait, $5 black-and-white, $10 color. I could have played Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, or listened to a white-haired black man with a bullhorn who had absolute conclusive proof that Jesus Christ was a full-blooded Negro born in present-day Gabon.

  I walked back and forth, back and forth. At one point I crossed Eighth and had a sandwich and a glass of milk at a stand-up lunch counter in the Port Authority bus terminal. I hung out there for a while—the air-conditioning was a blessing—and then something drove me back onto the street.

  One of the theaters had a pair of John Wayne movies, The War Wagon and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. I paid a dollar or two, whatever it cost, and went inside. I sat through the second half of one film and the first half of the other and went outside again.

  And walked some more.

  I was lost in thought and not paying attention when a black kid stepped up next to me and asked me what I was doing. I turned to look at him and he stared up at me with a challenging look in his eyes. He was fifteen or sixteen or seventeen, around the same age as the boy murdered in the film, but he looked far more streetwise.

  “I’m just looking in a store window,” I said.

  “You been lookin’ in every window,” he said. “You been up and down the block time and time again.”

  “So?”

  “So what you lookin’ for?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Walk on down to the corner,” he said. “Down to Eighth, and then around the corner and wait.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? So all these people don’t be lookin’ at us, that’s why.”

  I waited for him on Eighth Avenue, and he must have run around the block or taken a shortcut through the Carter Hotel. Years ago it was the Hotel Dixie, and it was famous for one thing—the switchboard operator answered every call, “Hotel Dixie, so what?” I think they changed the name about the same time that Jimmy Carter took the presidency away from Gerald Ford, but I could be wrong about that, and if it’s true it’s probably coincidence.

  I was standing in a doorway when he approached, walking south from Forty-third Street, his hands in his pockets and his head cocked to one side. He was wearing a denim jacket over a T-shirt and jeans. You would have thought he’d be roasting in that jacket, but the heat didn’t seem to bother him.

  He said, “I seen you yesterday and I seen you all day today. Back an’ forth, back an’ forth. What you lookin’ for, man?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Shit. Everybody on the Deuce be lookin’ for somethin’. First I thought you was a cop, but you ain’t a cop.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You ain’t.” He took a long look at me. “Are you? Maybe you are.”

  I laughed.

  “What you laughin’ at? You actin’ strange, man. Man asks do you want to buy reefer, do you want to buy rock, you just give your head a quick little shake, you don’t even look at the man. You want any kind of drugs?”

  “No.”

  “No. You want a date with a girl?” I shook my head. “A boy? Boy and a girl? You want to see a show, you want to be a show? Tell me what you want.”

  “I just came here to walk around,” I said. “I had some things to think about.”

  “Sheeeee,” he said. “Come on down to the Deuce to think. Put on my thinkin’ cap, come on down to the Street. You don’t say what you really want, how you gonna get it?”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  “Tell me what you want, I help you get it.”

  “I told you, there’s nothing I want.”

  “Well, shit, plenty of shit I want. Say you gimme a dollar.”

  There was no menace to him, no intimidation. I said, “Why should I give you a dollar?”

  “Just ’cause you an’ me be friends. Then maybe on account of we friends, I be givin’ you a jay. How’s that sound?”

  “I don’t smoke dope.”

  “You don’t smoke dope? What do you smoke?”

  “I don’t smoke anything.”

  “Then gimme a dollar an’ I won’t give you nothin’.”

  I laughed in spite of myself. I glanced around and no one was paying attention to us. I got out my wallet and
handed him a five.

  “What’s this for?”

  “’Cause we’re friends.”

  “Yeah, but what do you want? You want me to go somewhere with you?”

  “No.”

  “You just givin’ me this here.”

  “No strings. If you don’t want it—”

  I reached for the bill and he snatched it away, laughing. “Hey now,” he said. “You don’t be givin’ an’ takin’ back. Didn’t your mama teach you better’n that?” He pocketed the bill, cocked his head and gave me a look. “I still ain’t got you figured out,” he said.

  “There’s nothing to figure,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “My name? Why you want to know my name?”

  “No reason.”

  “You can call me TJ.”

  “All right.”

  “ ‘All right.’ What’s your name?”

  “You can call me Booker.”

  “What you say, Booker?” He shook his head. “Shit, you some-thin’, man. Booker. One thing you ain’t, you ain’t no Booker.”

  “My name’s Matt.”

  “Matt,” he said, trying it out. “Yeah, that’s cool. Matt. Matt. An’ that’s where it’s at, Matt.”

  “ ‘And that’s the truth, Ruth.’ ”

  His eyes lit up. “Hey,” he said. “You hip to Spike Lee? You seen that movie?”

  “Sure.”

  “I swear you hard to figure.”

  “There’s nothing to figure.”

  “You got some kind of a jones. I just can’t make out what it is.”

  “Maybe I haven’t got one.”

  “On this street?” He whistled tonelessly. He had a round face, a button nose, bright eyes. I wondered if my five dollars would go for a vial of crack. He was a little chubby for a crack head and he didn’t have the look they get, but then they don’t get it right away.

  “On the Deuce,” he said, “everybody got a jones. They got a crack jones or a smack jones, a sex jones or a money jones, a speed-it-up or a slow-it-down jones. Man ain’t got some kind of a jones, what he be doin’ here?”

  “And what about you, TJ?”

  He laughed. “Oh, I got me a jones jones,” he said. “I all the time got to be knowin’ what kind of a jones the other dude’s got, and that be my jones, an’ that’s where it’s at, Matt.”

  I spent a few minutes more with TJ, and he was the best five-dollar cure I could have found for the Forty-second Street blues. By the time I headed back uptown I had shaken off the pall that had cloaked me all day. I had a shower and ate a decent dinner and went to a meeting.

  The next day the phone rang while I was shaving, and I rode the subway to Brooklyn and got some work from a Court Street lawyer named Drew Kaplan. He had a client who was charged with vehicular homicide in a hit-and-run death.

  “He swears he’s innocent,” Kaplan said, “and I personally happen to think he’s full of shit, but on the chance that he’s actually telling his attorney the truth, we ought to see if there’s a witness somewhere who saw somebody else run over the old lady. You want to give it a go?”

  I put in a week on it, and then Kaplan told me to let it go, that they’d offered to let his client plead to reckless endangerment and leaving the scene.

  “And they’ll drop the homicide charge,” he said, “and I very strongly advised him to go for it, which he finally agreed to do once he got it into his head that this way he won’t be serving any time. They’re gonna ask for six months but I know the judge’ll agree to probation, so I’ll say yes to the deal tomorrow unless you just happened to find the perfect witness since I talked to you last.”

  “I found somebody just this afternoon.”

  “A priest,” he said. “A priest with twenty-twenty vision who holds the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  “Not quite, but a strong solid witness. The thing is, she’s positive your guy did it.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “This is somebody the other side doesn’t know about?”

  “They didn’t as of two hours ago.”

  “Well, let’s for God’s sake not tell them now,” he said. “I’ll close it out tomorrow. Your check, as they say, is in the mail. You’re still a guy who doesn’t have a license and doesn’t submit reports, right?”

  “Unless you need something for the record.”

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “what I need in this case is to not have something for the record, so you won’t submit a report and I’ll forget this conversation that we never had.”

  “Fine with me.”

  “Great. And Matt? Somewhere along the line you ought to think about getting yourself a ticket. I’d give you more work, but there’s stuff I can’t use you on unless you’ve got a license.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “Well,” he said, “if your status changes, let me know.”

  KAPLAN’S check was generous, and when it came I rented a car and drove up to the Berkshires with Elaine to spend some of it. When we got back Wally at Reliable called and I got two days’ work in connection with an insurance claim.

  The film I’d seen became part of the past, and my emotional connection to it faded. It had affected me because I had seen it, but in truth it had nothing to do with me or I with it, and as time passed and my life got back on its usual course, it became in my mind what it in fact was—i.e., one more outrage in a world that overflowed with them. I read the paper every morning, and every day there were fresh outrages to take the sting out of the old ones.

  There were images from the film that still came to my mind now and then, but they no longer held the same charge for me. And I didn’t get back to Forty-second Street, and I didn’t run into TJ again, and scarcely thought of him. He was an interesting character, but New York is full of characters, they’re all over the place.

  The year went on. The Mets faded and finished out of the race, and the Yankees were never in it. Two California teams met in the Series, and the most interesting thing that happened during it was the San Francisco earthquake. In November the city got its first black mayor, and the following week Amanda Warriner Thurman was raped and murdered three flights above an Italian restaurant on West Fifty-second Street.

  Then I saw a man’s hand smooth a boy’s light brown hair, and it all came back.

  Chapter 7

  I had eaten breakfast and read two newspapers by the time the bank opened. I got the cassette from my safe-deposit box and called Elaine from a pay phone on the street.

  She said, “Hi. How were the fights?”

  “Better than I expected. How was your class?”

  “Great, but there’s a ton of stuff I’ve got to read. And there’s one little airhead in the class who gets her hand up every time the instructor comes to the end of a sentence. If he doesn’t find a way to shut her up I may have to kill her.”

  I asked if I could come over. “I’d like to use your VCR for about an hour,” I said.

  “That’s fine,” she said, “if you come over right away, and if it’s really not much more than an hour. And if it’s more fun than the last cassette you brought me.”

  “I’ll be right over,” I said.

  I hung up and stepped to the curb and caught a cab right away. When I got there she took my coat and said, “Well, how did it go last night? Did you see the killer?” I must have stared, and she said, “Richard Thurman. Wasn’t he supposed to be there? Isn’t that why you went to Maspeth?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about him. He was there, yes, but I’m no closer to knowing if he killed her. I think I saw another killer.”

  “Oh?”

  “The man in the rubber suit. I saw a man and I think it was him.”

  “Was he wearing the same outfit?”

  “He was wearing a blue blazer.” I told her about the man, and the boy he’d had with him. “So it’s the same tape as last time,” I said. “I don’t think you’ll want to watch it again.”

  “Not for anything. W
hat I think I’ll do, I was figuring I might do this anyway, I’ll run out and buy books for my class. It shouldn’t take me more than an hour. You know how to work the VCR, don’t you?” I said I did. “And I’ll be back in time to get ready for my appointment. I’ve got somebody coming at eleven-thirty.”

  “I’ll be out of here by then.”

  I waited until she was out the door, then got the VCR going and fast-forwarded past the Dirty Dozen footage. She let herself back in a few minutes before eleven, almost exactly an hour after she’d left. By then I’d watched the show twice. It ran a half hour, but the second time around I’d worked the Fast Forward button, getting through it in half the time. I’d rewound the thing and was standing at the window when she came back.

  She said, “I just spent a hundred dollars on books. And I couldn’t find half of what’s on the list.”

  “Couldn’t you get paperbacks?”

  “These are paperbacks. I don’t know when I’m going to find time to read all of these.” She upended the shopping bag on the couch, picked up a book and tossed it back onto the pile. “At least they’re in English,” she said, “which is a good thing, since I don’t happen to read Spanish or Portuguese. But are you really reading something if you read it in translation?”

  “If it’s a good translation.”

  “I suppose so, but isn’t it like seeing a movie with subtitles? What you’re reading just isn’t the same as what they’re saying. Did you watch that thing?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And? Was it him?”

  “I think so,” I said. “It would be a lot easier to say if he hadn’t had that goddam hood on. He must have been sweltering in a skintight rubber suit and a rubber hood.”

  “Maybe the open crotch had a cooling effect.”

  “He looked right to me,” I said. “The one gesture, his hand on the boy’s hair, that’s what finally rang a bell for me, but there were other points of correspondence. The way he held himself, the way he moved, these are things you can’t cover up with a costume. The hands looked right. The gesture, stroking the boy’s hair, that was just as I remembered it.” I frowned. “I think it was the same girl, too.”