A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

by Lawrence Block

“What do you mean?”

  “I mean there’s no case. I talked to cops, I talked to an ADA. You got a whole batch of different things and they don’t add up to dick.”

  “One thing you’ve got,” I said, “is a visual record of two people committing murder.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Right. That’s what I saw and that’s what I can’t get out of my fucking head and that’s why I’m drinking bad whiskey in the worst shithole in town. But what does it really amount to? He’s got a hood covers most of his face and she’s got a fucking mask. Who are they? You say it’s Bergen and Olga and I say you’re probably right, but can you imagine putting the two of them in the dock and making a jury watch this and trying to make an identification on that basis? ‘Bailiff, will you please remove the female defendant’s dress so the jury can get a good look at her tits, see if they match the set in the movie?’ Because the tits are all you really get a good look at.”

  “You get to see her mouth.”

  “Yeah, and there’s generally something in it. Look, here’s the point. Odds are you could never get the tape seen by a jury. Any defense attorney’s gonna try and get it disallowed, and they most likely could, because it’s inflammatory. I’ll fucking well say it’s inflammatory. It inflamed the shit out of me, it made me want to jail those two fuckers and weld the cell door shut.”

  “But a jury can’t see it.”

  “Probably not, but before it gets that far they tell me you can’t even get an indictment, because what have you got to present to a grand jury? First off, who was murdered?”

  “A kid.”

  “A kid we don’t know zip about. Maybe his name is Happy and maybe he comes from Texas or South Carolina or some state where they play a lot of high school football. Where’s the body? Nobody knows. When did the alleged homicide take place? Nobody knows. Did he really get killed? Nobody knows.”

  “You saw it, Joe.”

  “I see stuff on TV and in the movies all the time. Special effects, they call it. They got these hero killers, Jason, Freddie, they’re in one movie after another, wasting people left and right. I’ll tell you, they make it look as good as Bergen and Olga.”

  “There were no special effects in what we saw. That was home video.”

  “I know that. I also know that the tape doesn’t amount to evidentiary proof that a murder was committed, and that without the where and the when and some proof that somebody actually got killed, you got next to nothing to walk into a courtroom with.”

  “What about Leveque?”

  “What about him?”

  “His murder’s a matter of record.”

  “So? There is nothing anywhere to link Arnold Leveque to either of the Stettners. The only tie is the unsupported testimony of Richard Thurman, who’s conveniently dead himself and who told you this in a private conversation with no witnesses present, and it’s all hearsay and almost certainly not allowable. And not even Thurman could connect the Stettners to the film. He said Leveque was trying to blackmail Stettner with a film, but he also said Stettner got that film and that was the end of it. You can be positive in your own mind that we’re talking about the same film here, and you can work it out that Leveque was the cameraman and was there when the kid’s blood went down the drain, but that’s not proof. You couldn’t even say it in court without some lawyer jumping straight down your throat.”

  “What about the other boy? Bobby, the younger one.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “What have you got? You’ve got a sketch based on a look you got at him sitting next to Stettner at a boxing match. You got some kid somebody hunted up who says he recognizes the kid and his name’s Bobby, but he doesn’t know his last name or where he’s from or what happened to him. You got somebody else who says Bobby used to be with a pimp who used to threaten kids that he’d send them out and they wouldn’t come back.”

  “His name’s Juke,” I said. “He shouldn’t be too hard to trace.”

  “He was a cinch, as a matter of fact. People complain a lot about the computer system but it makes some things easy. Juke is a guy named Walter Nicholson. A/k/a Juke, a/k/a Juke Box. First bit he did was for breaking into coin-operated vending machines, which is where the nickname came from. Arrested for statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and immoral solicitation. In other words a lot of pimping arrests, a whole profile of pimping kids. A class act.”

  “Can’t you pick him up? He could tie Bobby to Stettner.”

  “You got to get him to talk, which would be hard without having something to hold over his head, which I don’t see here. And then you’d have to get somebody to believe anything a scumbag like Juke might say. But you can’t do any of that because the prick happens to be dead.”

  “Stettner got him.”

  “No, Stettner didn’t get him. He—”

  “The same as he got Thurman, to get rid of a witness before anybody could get to him. Dammit, if I’d come in right away, if I hadn’t waited over the weekend—”

  “Matt, Juke got killed a week ago. And Stettner didn’t have anything to do with it and probably doesn’t even know it happened. Juke and another of Nature’s noblemen shot each other in a social club on Lenox Avenue. They were fighting over a ten-year-old girl. Must be some hot broad, got two grown men shooting each other over her, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Look,” he said, “I fucking hate this. I got the word last night and I went in this morning and carried on, and they’re right. They’re wrong but they’re right. And I waited until tonight to call you because I wasn’t looking forward to this conversation, believe it or not. Much as I like your company under other circumstances.” He poured more whiskey into his glass. I got a whiff of it, but it didn’t make me want it. Nor was it the worst smell in Pete’s All-American.

  I said, “I think I understand, Joe. I knew it was thin with Thurman dead.”

  “With Thurman alive I think we probably would have had them. But once he’s dead there’s no case.”

  “But if you mount a full-scale investigation—”

  “Jesus,” he said, “don’t you get it? There’s no grounds for an investigation. There’s no complaint to act on, there’s no probable cause for a warrant, there’s a whole lot of nothing is what there is. The man’s not a criminal, for openers. Never been arrested. You say mob connections, but his name’s not in any files, never came up in any RICO investigations. Man’s clean as a whistle. Lives on Central Park South, makes a good living trading in foreign currencies—”

  “That’s money laundering.”

  “So you say, but can you prove it? He pays his taxes, he gives to charities, he’s made substantial political contributions—”

  “Oh?”

  “Don’t give me that. It’s not any clout that makes it impossible to take him down. Nobody ordered us off it because the prick’s untouchable, he’s got a hook with somebody important. No such thing. But he’s not some street kid you can push around and never hear about it. You gotta have something’ll stand up in court, and you want to know what stands up in court? Let me just say two words. You wanna hear two words? Warren Madison.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, ‘Oh.’ Warren Madison, terror of the Bronx. Deals dope, kills four other dealers we know for sure and is listed as probable for five others, and when they finally corner this wanted fugitive in his mother’s apartment he shoots six cops before they get the cuffs on him. He shoots six cops!”

  “I remember.”

  “And that cocksucker Gruliow defends him, and what does he do, what he always does, he puts the cops on trial. Spins out all this shit about how the Bronx cops were using Madison as a snitch, and they were giving him confiscated cocaine to sell, and then they tried to murder him to keep him from talking. Do you fucking believe it? Six police officers with bullets in ’em, not a single bullet in Warren fucking Madison, and that means it was all a police department plot to kill the fuck.”

  “The
jury bought it.”

  “Fucking Bronx jury, they would have cut Hitler loose, sent him home in a cab. And that’s with a piece of shit of a dope dealer that everybody knew was guilty. You imagine what you’d get bringing a shaky case against a solid citizen like Stettner? Look, Matt, do you see what I mean? Do you want me to go over it again?”

  I saw, but we went over it anyway. Somewhere in the course of it the Ten High began to get the upper hand. His eyes lost their sharp focus and he started slurring his words. Pretty soon he began repeating himself, losing track of his own arguments.

  “Let’s get out of this dive,” I said. “Are you hungry? Let’s get something to eat, maybe some coffee.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that I wouldn’t mind some food.”

  “Horseshit. Don’t patronize me, you son of a bitch.”

  “I wasn’t doing that.”

  “Fuck you weren’t. That what they teach you at those meetings? How to be a pain in the ass when another man wants to have a quiet couple of drinks?”

  “No.”

  “Just because you’re some kind of candyass who can’t handle it anymore doesn’t mean God appointed you to sober up the rest of the fucking world.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Sit down. Where you going? For Christ’s sake sit down.”

  “I think I’ll get on home now,” I said.

  “Matt? I’m sorry. I was out of line there, okay? I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “No problem.”

  He apologized again and I told him it was fine, and then the booze took him back in the other direction and he decided he didn’t like the tone of what I’d said. “Hang on one second,” I told him. “Stay right where you are, I’ll be back in a minute.” And I walked out of there and headed home.

  He was drunk, with the better part of a bottle still sitting there in front of him. He had his service revolver on his hip and I thought I recognized his car parked at the curb alongside a fire hydrant. It was a dangerous combination, but God hadn’t appointed me to sober up the rest of the fucking world, or to make sure everybody got home safe, either.

  Chapter 20

  When I went to sleep that night the videocassette was on the table next to the clock, and it was the first thing my eyes happened to hit the next morning. I left it there and went out to meet the day. That was Thursday, and while I didn’t chase out to Maspeth to watch the fights that night, I did get home in time to catch the main event on television. Somehow it wasn’t the same.

  Another day passed before it occurred to me that the cassette belonged in my safety-deposit box, and by then it was Saturday and the bank was closed. I saw Elaine Saturday; we spent the late afternoon browsing through art galleries in SoHo, ate at an Italian place in the Village, and listened to a piano trio at Sweet Basil. It was a day of long silences of the sort possible only for people who have grown very comfortable together. In the cab home we held hands and didn’t say a word.

  I had told her earlier about my conversation with Joe, and neither of us returned to the topic that afternoon or evening. The following night Jim Faber and I had our standing Sunday dinner date, and I didn’t discuss the case with him at all. It crossed my mind once or twice in the course of our conversation but it wasn’t something I felt the need to talk about.

  It seems odd now, but I didn’t even spend that much time thinking about it for those several days. It’s not as though I had a great deal of other things on my mind. I didn’t, nor did sports provide much in the way of diversion, not in that stretch of frozen desert that extends from the Super Bowl to the start of spring training.

  The mind, from what I know of it, has various levels or chambers, and deals with matters in many other ways than conscious thought. When I was a police detective, and since then in my private work, there have not been that many occasions when I sat down and consciously figured something out. Most of the time the accretion of detail ultimately made a solution obvious, but, when some insight on my part was required, it more often than not simply came to me. Some unconscious portion of the mind evidently processed the available data and allowed me to see the puzzle in a new light.

  So I can only suppose that I made an unconscious decision to shelve the whole subject of the Stettners for the time being, to put it out of my mind (or, perhaps, into my mind, into some deeper recess of self) until I knew what to do about it.

  It didn’t take all that long. As to how well it worked, well, that’s harder to say.

  TUESDAY morning I dialed 411 and asked for the number for Bergen Stettner on Central Park South. The operator told me she could not give out that number, but volunteered that she had a business listing for the same party on Lexington Avenue. I thanked her and broke the connection. I called back and got a different operator, a man, and identified myself as a police officer, supplying a name and shield number. I said I needed an unlisted number and gave him the name and address. He gave me the number and I thanked him and dialed it.

  A woman answered and I asked for Mr. Stettner. She said he was out and I asked if she was Mrs. Stettner. She took an extra second or two to decide, then allowed that she was.

  I said, “Mrs. Stettner, I have something that belongs to you and your husband, and I’m hoping that you’re offering a substantial reward for its return.”

  “Who is this?”

  “My name is Scudder,” I said. “Matthew Scudder.”

  “I don’t believe I know you.”

  “We met,” I said, “but I wouldn’t expect you to remember me. I’m a friend of Richard Thurman’s.”

  There was a pronounced pause this time, while I suppose she tried to work out whether her friendship with Thurman was a matter of record. Evidently she decided that it was.

  “Such a tragic affair,” she said. “It was a great shock.”

  “It must have been.”

  “And you say you were a friend of his?”

  “That’s right. I was also a close friend of Arnold Leveque’s.”

  Another pause. “I’m afraid I don’t know him.”

  “Another tragic affair.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I’m very sorry, but I never knew the man. If you could tell me what it is you want—”

  “Over the phone? Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  “My husband’s not here at the moment,” she said. “If you would leave your number perhaps he’ll call you back.”

  “I have a tape Leveque made,” I said. “Do you really want me to tell you about it over the phone?”

  “No.”

  “I want to meet with you privately. Just you, not your husband.”

  “I see.”

  “Someplace public, but private enough that we won’t be overheard.”

  “Give me a moment,” she said. She took a full minute. Then she said, “Do you know where I live? You must, you even have the number. How did you get the number? It’s supposed to be impossible to get an unlisted number.”

  “I guess they made a mistake.”

  “They wouldn’t make that sort of mistake. Oh, of course, you got it from Richard. But—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. You know the address. There is a cocktail lounge right here in the building, it’s always quiet during the day. Meet me there in an hour.”

  “Fine.”

  “Wait a minute. How will I recognize you?”

  “I’ll recognize you,” I said. “Just wear the mask. And leave your shirt off.”

  * * *

  THE cocktail lounge was called Hadrian’s Wall. Hadrian was a Roman emperor, and the wall named for him was a fortified stone barrier built across the north of England to protect Roman settlements there from barbarous tribes. Any significance the name may have had was lost on me. The decor was expensive and understated, running to red leather banquettes and black mica tables. The lighting was subdued and indirect, the music barely a
udible.

  I got there five minutes early, sat at a table and ordered a Perrier. She arrived ten minutes late, entering from the lobby, standing just inside the archway and trying to scan the room. I stood up to make it easier for her and she walked without hesitation to my table. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” she said. “I’m Olga Stettner.”

  “Matthew Scudder.”

  She held out her hand and I took it. Her hand was smooth and cool to the touch, her grip strong. I thought of an iron hand in a velvet glove. Her fingernails were long, and the scarlet polish matched her lipstick.

  In the video she’d had the same color on the tips of her breasts.

  We both sat down, and almost immediately the waiter was at our table. She called him by name and asked for a glass of white wine. I told him he could bring me another Perrier. Neither of us said a word until he had brought the drinks and gone away again. Then she said, “I’ve seen you before.”

  “I told you we’d met.”

  “Where?” She frowned, then said, “Of course. At the arena. Downstairs. You were skulking around.”

  “I was looking for the men’s room.”

  “So you said.” She lifted her wine glass and took a small sip, really just wetting her tongue. She was wearing a dark silk blouse and a patterned silk scarf, fastened at her throat with a jeweled pin. The stone looked like lapis and her eyes looked blue, but it was hard to tell colors in the dimly lit lounge.

  “Tell me what you want,” she said.

  “Why don’t I tell you what I have first.”

  “All right.”

  I started by saying that I was an ex-cop, which didn’t seem to astonish her. I guess I have the look. I had met a man named Arnold Leveque when we’d pulled him in on a sweep designed to clean up Times Square. Leveque had been a clerk in an adult bookstore, I said, and we’d arrested him for possession and sale of obscene materials.

  “Later on,” I said, “something came up and I had occasion to leave the NYPD. Last year I heard from Leveque, who got the word I was working private. Well, I hadn’t seen Arnie in years. He was the same. Fatter, but pretty much the same.”