A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

by Lawrence Block

  “I guess we’re in the grip of a moral renaissance.”

  “That’s his point.” He picked up his chopsticks, mimed a drumroll. “I wonder if he called my house.”

  “Oh?”

  Avoiding my eyes, he said, “I think Beverly’s seeing somebody.”

  “Somebody in particular?”

  “A guy she met in Al-Anon.”

  “Maybe they’re just friends.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” He poured tea for both of us. “You know, I screwed around a lot before I got sober. Whenever I went to a bar I told myself I was looking to meet somebody. Generally all I got was drunk, but now and then I got lucky. Sometimes I even remembered it.”

  “And sometimes you’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Well, sure. The point is I didn’t give that up completely when I first came into the program. The marriage almost ended during the worst of the drinking, but I bottomed out and sobered up and we worked things out. She started going to Al-Anon, started dealing with her own issues, and we hung together. I would still have something going on the side, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “No?” He thought about it. “Well, I guess that was before I knew you, before you got sober. Because I stopped fooling around after a couple of years. It was no great moral decision to reform. I just didn’t seem to be doing that anymore. I don’t know, the health thing may have been a factor, first herpes and then AIDS, but I don’t think I got scared off. I think I lost interest.” He took a sip of tea. “And now I’m one of Father Feeney’s ninety percent, and she’s out there.”

  “Well, maybe it’s her turn. To have a little fling.”

  “This isn’t the first time.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I don’t know how I feel about it.”

  “Does she know that you know?”

  “Who knows what she knows? Who knows what I know? I just wanted things to stay the way they were, you know? And they never do.”

  “I know,” I said. “I was with Elaine last night and she said the M word.”

  “What’s that, motherfucker?”

  “Marriage.”

  “Same thing,” he said. “Marriage is a motherfucker. She wants to get married?”

  “She didn’t say that. She said if we were to get married, then she’d stop seeing clients.”

  “Clients?”

  “Johns.”

  “Oh, right. That’s the condition? Marry me and I’ll stop?”

  “No, nothing like that. Just speaking hypothetically, and then she apologized for saying the word and we both agreed we want things to stay the way they are.” I looked down into my teacup the way I used to look into a glass of whiskey. “I don’t know if that’s going to be possible. It seems to me that when two people want something to stay just the way it is, that’s when it changes.”

  “Well,” he said, “you’ll have to see how it goes.”

  “And take it a day at a time, and don’t drink.”

  “I like that,” he said. “It has a nice ring to it.”

  WE sat there a long while, talking about one thing and another. I talked about my cases, the legitimate one that I couldn’t seem to come to grips with and the other one that I couldn’t seem to leave alone. We talked about baseball and how spring training might be delayed by an owners’ lockout. We talked about a kid in our home group with a horrendous history of drugs and alcohol who’d gone out after four months of sobriety.

  Around eight he said, “What I think I’ll do tonight, I think I’ll go to some meeting where I won’t run into anybody I know. I want to talk about all this shit with Bev at a meeting and I can’t do that around here.”

  “You could.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to. I’m an old-timer, I’ve been sober since the Flood, I wouldn’t want the newcomers to realize I’m not a perfect model of serenity.” He grinned. “I’ll go downtown and give myself permission to sound as confused and fucked-up as I feel. And who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky, find some sweet young thing looking for a father figure.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “Find out if she’s got a sister.”

  I went to a meeting myself. There’s no meeting at St. Paul’s on Sundays, so I went to one at Roosevelt Hospital. A fair number of the people who showed up were in-patients from the detox ward. The speaker had started out as a heroin addict, kicked that in a twenty-eight-day residential program in Minnesota, and devoted the next fifteen years to alcoholic drinking. Now she was almost three years sober.

  They went around the room after she was done, and most of the patients just said their names and passed. I decided I’d say something, if just to tell her I enjoyed her story and was glad she was sober, but when it got to me I said, “My name is Matt and I’m an alcoholic. I’ll just listen tonight.”

  Afterward I went back to the hotel. No messages. I sat in my room reading for two hours. Someone had passed along a paperback volume called The Newgate Calendar, a case-by-case report on British crimes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I’d had it around for a month or so, and at night I would read a few pages before I went to sleep.

  It was mostly interesting, although some cases were more interesting than others. What got to me some nights, though, was the way nothing changed. People back then killed each other for every reason and for no reason, and they did it with every means at their disposal and all the ingenuity they could bring to bear.

  Sometimes it provided a good antidote for the morning paper, with its deadening daily chronicle of contemporary crime. It was easy to read the paper each day and conclude that humanity was infinitely worse than ever, that the world was going to hell and that hell was where we belonged. Then, when I read about men and women killing each other centuries ago for pennies or for love, I could tell myself that we weren’t getting worse after all, that we were as good as we’d ever been.

  On other nights that same revelation brought not reassurance but despair. We had been ever thus. We were not getting better, we would never get better. Anyone along the way who’d died for our sins had died for nothing. We had more sins in reserve, we had a supply that would last for all eternity.

  WHAT I read that night didn’t pick me up, and neither did it ready me for sleep. Around midnight I went out. It had turned colder, and there was a raw wind blowing off the Hudson. I walked over to Grogan’s Open House, the old Irish saloon Mick owns, although there’s another name than his on the license and ownership papers.

  The place was almost empty. Two solitary drinkers sat well apart at the long bar, one drinking a bottle of beer, the other nursing a black pint of Guinness. Two old men in long thrift-shop overcoats shared a table along the wall. Burke was behind the bar. Before I could ask he volunteered that Mick hadn’t been in all evening. “He could come in any time,” he said, “but I don’t expect him.”

  I ordered a Coke and sat at the bar. The TV was tuned to a cable channel that broadcasts old black-and-white films uninterrupted by commercials. They were showing Little Caesar, with Edward G. Robinson.

  I watched for half an hour or so. Mick didn’t come in, and neither did anyone else. I finished my Coke and went home.

  Chapter 10

  The cops at the Twentieth Precint weren’t overly impressed that I’d been on the job once myself. They were courteous all the same, and would have been happy to fill me in on the circumstances of Arnold Leveque’s death. There was only one problem. They had never heard of him.

  “I don’t know the date,” I said, “but it happened sometime between April nineteenth and June fourth, and if I were guessing I’d say early May.”

  “That’s of last year.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s Arnold Leveque? You want to spell the last name again, make sure I got it right?”

  I did, and supplied the Columbus Avenue address. “That’s here in the Two-oh,” he said. “Lemme see if anybody heard of the guy.” No one had. He came back and we puzzled
over it for a few minutes, and then he excused himself again. He came back with a bemused expression on his face.

  “Arnold Leveque,” he said. “Male Caucasian, died nine May. Multiple stab wounds. Not in our files because it wasn’t our case. He was killed on the other side of Fifty-ninth Street. You want Midtown North, that’s on West Fifty-fourth.”

  I told him I knew where it was.

  THAT explained why Herta Eigen got the runaround from the cops at her local precinct—they hadn’t known what she was talking about. I’d walked up to the Twentieth first thing after breakfast, and it was mid-morning when I got to Midtown North. Durkin wasn’t in, but I didn’t need him to run interference for me on this. Anybody could give me the information.

  There was a cop named Andreotti whom I’d met a few times over the past year or two. He was at a desk catching up on his paperwork and didn’t mind an interruption. “Leveque, Leveque,” he said. He frowned and ran a hand through a mop of shaggy black hair. “I think I caught that one, me and Bellamy. A fat guy, right?”

  “So they tell me.”

  “You see so many stiffs in a week you can’t keep ’em straight. He musta been murdered. Natural causes, you can’t even remember their names.”

  “No.”

  “Except if it’s the kind of name you can’t forget. There was a woman two, three weeks back, Wanda Plainhouse. I thought, yeah, I wouldn’t mind playin’ house with you.” He smiled at the memory, then said, “Of course she was alive, Wanda, but it’s an example of how one name’ll stick in your mind.”

  He pulled Leveque’s file. The film buff had been found in a narrow alley between two tenements on Forty-ninth Street west of Tenth Avenue. The body had been discovered after an anonymous call to 911 logged in at 6:56 on the morning of May 9th. The medical examiner estimated the time of death at around eleven the previous night. The deceased had been stabbed seven times in the chest and abdomen with a long, narrow-bladed knife. Any of several of the wounds would have been sufficient to cause death.

  “Forty-ninth between Tenth and Eleventh,” I said.

  “Closer to Eleventh. The buildings on either side were scheduled for demolition, X’s on the windows and nobody living in ’em. I think they might have come down by now.”

  “I wonder what he was doing there.”

  Andreotti shrugged. “Looking for something and unlucky enough to find it. Looking to buy dope, looking for a woman or a man. Everybody’s out there looking for something.”

  I thought of TJ. Everybody’s got a jones, he’d said, or what would they be doing on the Deuce?

  I asked if Leveque had been a drug user. No outward signs of it, he said, but you never knew. “Maybe he was drunk,” he offered. “Staggering around, didn’t know where he was. No, that’s not it. Blood alcohol’s not much more than a trace. Well, whatever he was looking for, he picked the wrong place to look for it.”

  “You figured robbery?”

  “No money in his pockets, no watch and wallet. Sounds like a killer with a crack habit and a switchblade.”

  “How’d you ID him?”

  “The landlady where he lived. She was some piece of work, man. About this high, but she wasn’t taking no shit. Let us into his room and stood there watching us like a hawk, like we’ll clean the place out if she turns her back. You’d think it was her stuff, which it probably wound up being, because I don’t think we ever did turn up any next of kin.” He flipped through the few sheets of paper. “No, I don’t think we did. Anyway, she ID’d him. She didn’t want to go. ‘Why I got to look at a dead body? I seen enough in my life, believe me.’ But she took a good look and said it was him.”

  “How did you know to ask her? What gave you his name and address?”

  “Oh, I get you. That’s a good question. How did we know?” He frowned, paging through the file. “Prints,” he said. “His prints were in the computer and that gave us the name and address.”

  “How did his prints happen to be on file?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he was in the service, maybe he had a government job once. You know how many people got their prints on file?”

  “Not in the NYPD computer.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” He frowned. “Did we have him or did we have to hook into the main system in Washington? I don’t remember. Somebody else probably took care of it. Why?”

  “Did you see if he’s got a sheet?”

  “If he did it must have been jaywalking. There’s no notation in his file.”

  “Could you check?”

  He grumbled but did it anyway. “Yeah, just one entry,” he said. “Arrested four, almost five years ago. Released OR and charges dropped.”

  “What charges?”

  He squinted at the computer screen. “Violation of Section 235 of the Criminal Code. What the hell is that, it’s not a number I’m familiar with.” He grabbed up the black looseleaf binder and flipped through it. “Here you go. Obscenity. Maybe he called somebody a bad name. Charges dismissed, and four years later somebody sticks a knife in him. Teach you not to talk nasty, wouldn’t it?”

  I probably could have learned more about Leveque if Andreotti had felt like jockeying the computer, but he had things of his own to do. I went to the main library on Forty-second Street and checked the Times Index on the chance that Arnold Leveque might have made the paper, but he’d managed to be spared publicity when he got arrested and when he got killed.

  I took the subway down to Chambers Street and visited a few state and city government offices, where I found several public employees who were willing to do me a favor if I did them favors in return. They checked their records, and I slipped them some money.

  I managed to learn that Arnold Leveque had been born thirty-eight years ago in Lowell, Massachusetts. By the time he was twenty-three he was in New York, living at the Sloane House YMCA on West Thirty-fourth and working in the mailroom of a textbook publisher. A year later he had left the publisher and was working for a firm called R & J Merchandise, with an address on Fifth Avenue in the Forties. He was a salesclerk there. I don’t know what they sold, and the firm no longer existed. There are a lot of little clip joints on that stretch of Fifth Avenue, salted in among the legitimate stores and having endless Going Out Of Business sales, hawking dubious ivory and jade, cameras and electronic gear. R & J might well have been one of them.

  He was still at Sloane House then, and as far as I could tell he stayed there until he moved to Columbus Avenue in the fall of ’79. The move may have been prompted by a job switch; a month earlier he had started work at CBS, located a block west of my hotel on Fifty-seventh Street. He’d have been able to walk to work from his new lodgings.

  I couldn’t tell what he did at CBS, but they only paid him $16,000 a year to do it, so I don’t suppose they made him president of the network. He was at CBS a little over three years, and he was up to $18,500 when he left in October of ’82.

  As far as I could tell he hadn’t worked since.

  THERE was mail for me back at the hotel. I could join an international association of retired police officers and attend annual conventions in Fort Lauderdale. The benefits of membership included a membership card, a handsome lapel pin, and a monthly newsletter. What on earth could they run in the newsletter? Obituaries?

  There was a message to call Joe Durkin. I caught him at his desk, and he said, “I understand Thurman’s not enough for you. You’re trying to clear all our open files.”

  “Just trying to be helpful.”

  “Arnold Leveque. How does he tie into Thurman?”

  “He probably doesn’t.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He got it in May and she got it in November, almost six months to the day. Looks to me like a definite pattern’s shaping up.”

  “The MO’s a little different.”

  “Well, she was raped and strangled by burglars and he got knifed in an alleyway, but that’s just because the killers want to throw us off track. Seriously, you got anything going with Leveque
?”

  “It’s hard to say. I wish I knew what he did the last seven years of his life.”

  “Hung out in bad neighborhoods, evidently. What else does a man have to do?”

  “He didn’t work and he wasn’t collecting welfare or SSI that I can tell. I saw where he lived and his rent couldn’t amount to much, but he had to have money from somewhere.”

  “Maybe he came into some money. It worked for Amanda Thurman.”

  “That would give them another point of similarity,” I said. “I like your line of reasoning.”

  “Yeah, well, my mind never stops working. Even when I sleep.”

  “Especially when you sleep.”

  “You got it. What’s this about he didn’t work in seven years? He was working when they arrested him.”

  “Not according to the state records.”

  “Well, screw the state records,” he said. “That’s how he got cracked, he was the clerk when they violated the place for obscenity. Leveque, he’s French, I guess they got him for postcards, don’t you figure?”

  “He was selling pornography?”

  “Didn’t you get that from Andreotti?”

  “Uh-uh. Just the number of the code violation.”

  “Well, he could have got more than that with a little digging. They did a sweep of Times Square whenever it was, October of ’85. Oh, sure, I remember that. It was right before the election; the mayor wanted to look good. I wonder what the new guy’s gonna be like.”

  “I wouldn’t want his job.”

  “Oh, Christ, if it was be mayor or hang myself I’d say, ‘Gimme the rope.’ Anyway, Leveque. They hit all the stores, bagged all the clerks, hauled off all the dirty magazines and called a press conference. A few guys spent a night in jail and that was the end of it. All charges were dropped.”

  “And they gave back the dirty books.”

  He laughed. “There’s a stack of them in a warehouse somewhere,” he said, “that nobody’ll find till the twenty-third century. Of course, a few choice items might have been taken home to spice up some policeman’s marriage.”