A Dance at the Slaughterhouse Read online

  “Long hair and granny glasses,” Elaine said. “And a long gingham gown. Who said the sixties were over?”

  “All her songs sound the same.”

  “Well, she only knows three chords.”

  Outside I asked her if she felt like listening to some jazz. She said, “Sure, where? Sweet Basil? The Vanguard? Pick a place.”

  “I was thinking maybe Mother Goose.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. I like Mother Goose.”

  “So do you want to go?”

  “Sure. Do we get to stay even if Danny Boy’s not there?”

  DANNY Boy wasn’t there, but we hadn’t been there long before he showed up. Mother Goose is at Amsterdam and Eighty-first, a jazz club that draws a salt-and-pepper crowd. They keep the lights low, and the drummer uses brushes and never takes a solo. It and Poogan’s Pub are the two places where you can find Danny Boy Bell.

  Wherever you find him, he tends to stand out. He’s an albino Negro, his skin and eyes both extremely sensitive to sunlight, and he has arranged his life so he and the sun are never up at the same time. He is a small man who dresses with flair, favoring dark suits and flamboyant vests. He drinks a lot of Russian vodka, straight up and ice-cold, and he often has a woman with him, usually every bit as flashy as his vest. The one tonight had a mane of strawberry blond hair and absolutely enormous breasts.

  The maître d’ led them to the ringside table where he always sits. I didn’t think he’d noticed us, but at the end of the set a waiter appeared at our table and said that Mr. Bell hoped we would join him. When we got there Danny Boy said, “Matthew, Elaine, it’s so nice to see you both. This is Sascha, isn’t she darling?”

  Sascha giggled. We made conversation, and after a few minutes Sascha sashayed off to the ladies’ room.

  “To powder her nose,” Danny Boy said. “As it were. The best argument for legalizing drugs is people wouldn’t keep running to the lavatory all the time. When they figure out the man-hours cocaine is costing American industry, they really ought to factor in those rest-room trips.”

  I waited until Sascha’s next trip to the ladies’ room to bring up Richard Thurman. “I sort of assumed he killed her,” Danny Boy said. “She was rich and he wasn’t. If only the fellow was a doctor I’d say there was no doubt at all. Why do you suppose doctors are always killing their wives? Do they tend to marry bitches? How would you explain it?”

  We kicked it around some. I said maybe they were used to playing God, making life-and-death decisions. Elaine had a more elaborate theory. She said people who went into the healing professions were frequently individuals who were trying to overcome a perception of themselves as hurting people. “They become doctors to prove they’re not killers,” she said, “and then when they experience stress they revert to what they think of as their basic nature, and they kill.”

  “That’s interesting,” Danny Boy said. “Why would they have that perception in the first place?”

  “A birth thought,” she said. “The mother almost dies when they’re born, or experiences a great deal of pain. So the child’s thought is I hurt women or I kill women. He tries to compensate for this by becoming a doctor, and later on when push comes to shove—”

  “He kills his wife,” Danny Boy said. “I like it.”

  I asked what data she had to support the theory, and she said she didn’t have any, but there were lots of studies on the effects of birth thoughts. Danny Boy said he didn’t care about data, you could find data to prove anything, but the theory was the first one he’d ever heard that made sense to him, so screw the data. Sascha had returned to the table during the discussion but it went on without interruption, and she didn’t seem to be paying any attention.

  “About Thurman,” Danny Boy said. “I haven’t heard anything specific. I haven’t listened all that hard. Should I?”

  “Be good to keep an ear open.”

  He poured himself a few ounces of Stoly. At both of his places, Poogan’s and Mother Goose, they bring him his vodka in a champagne bucket packed with ice. He looked down into the glass, then drank it down like water.

  He said, “He’s with a cable channel. A new sports channel.”

  “Five Borough.”

  “That’s right. There’s some talk going around about them.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing very specific. Something shaky or shady about it, some dubious money backing it. I’ll see what else I hear.”

  A few minutes later Sascha left the table again. When she was out of earshot Elaine leaned forward and said, “I can’t stand it. That child has the biggest tits I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “I know.”

  “Danny Boy, they’re bigger than your head.”

  “I know. She’s special, isn’t she? But I think I’m going to have to give her up.” He poured himself another drink. “I can’t afford her,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe what it costs to keep that little nose happy.”

  “Enjoy her while you can.”

  “Oh, I shall,” he said. “Like life itself.”

  BACK in her apartment, Elaine made a pot of coffee and we sat on the couch. She stacked some solo piano recordings on the turntable—Monk, Randy Weston, Cedar Walton. She said, “She was something, wasn’t she? Sascha. I don’t know where Danny Boy finds them.”

  “K Mart,” I suggested.

  “When you see something like that you have to figure silicone, but maybe they’re like Topsy, maybe they just growed. What do you think?”

  “I didn’t really notice.”

  “Then you better start going to more meetings, because it must have been the vodka that was making you drool.” She drew closer to me. “What do you think? Would you like me better if I had huge tits?”

  “Sure.”

  “You would?”

  I nodded. “Longer legs would be nice, too.”

  “Is that a fact? What about trimmer ankles?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Really? Tell me more.”

  “Cut it out,” I said. “That tickles.”

  “Does it really? Tell me what else you’ve got on your wish list. How about a tight pussy?”

  “That would be too much to hope for.”

  “Oh, boy,” she said. “You’re really asking for it, aren’t you?”

  “Am I?”

  “Oh, I hope so,” she said. “I certainly hope so.”

  AFTERWARD I lay in her bed while she turned the stack of records and brought back two cups of coffee. We sat up in bed and didn’t say much.

  After a while she said, “You were pissed yesterday.”

  “I was? When?”

  “When you had to get out of here because I had somebody coming over.”

  “Oh.”

  “Weren’t you? Pissed?”

  “A little bit. I got over it.”

  “It bothers you, doesn’t it? That I see clients.”

  “Sometimes it does. Most of the time it doesn’t.”

  “I’ll probably stop sooner or later,” she said. “You can only keep on pitching for so long. Even Tommy John had to pack it in, and he had a bionic arm.” She rolled onto her side to face me, put a hand on my leg. “If you asked me to stop, I probably would.”

  “And then resent me for it.”

  “You think so? Am I that neurotic?” She thought it over. “Yeah,” she said, “I probably am.”

  “Anyway, I wouldn’t ask you.”

  “No, you’d rather have the resentment.” She rolled over and lay on her back, gazing up at the ceiling. After a moment she said, “I’d give it up if we got married.”

  There was silence, and then a cascade of descending notes and a surprising atonal chord from the stereo.

  “If you pretend you didn’t hear that,” Elaine said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t say it. We never even say the L word and I went and said the M word.”

  “It’s a dan
gerous place,” I said, “out there in the middle of the alphabet.”

  “I know. I should learn to stay in the F’s where I belong. I don’t want to get married. I like things just the way they are. Can’t they just stay that way?”

  “Sure.”

  “I feel sad. That’s crazy, what the hell have I got to feel sad about? All of a sudden I’m all weepy.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I’m not going to cry. But hold me for a minute, okay? You big old bear. Just hold me.”

  Chapter 9

  Sunday afternoon I found my film buff.

  His name, according to Phil Fielding’s records, was Arnold Leveque, and he lived on Columbus Avenue half a dozen blocks north of the video store. His building was a tenement that had thus far escaped gentrification. Two men sat on the stoop drinking beer out of cans in brown paper bags. One of them had a little girl on his lap. She was drinking orange juice out of a baby bottle.

  None of the doorbells had Leveque’s name on it. I went out and asked the two men on the stoop if Arnold Leveque lived there. They shrugged and shook their heads. I went inside and couldn’t find a bell for the super, so I rang bells on the first floor until someone buzzed me in.

  The hallway smelled of mice and urine. At the far end a door opened and a man stuck his head out. I walked toward him, and he said, “What do you want? Don’t come too close now.”

  “Easy,” I said.

  “You take it easy,” he said. “I got a knife.”

  I held my hands at my sides, showing the palms. I told him I was looking for a man named Arnold Leveque.

  He said, “Oh, yeah? I hope he don’t owe you money.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “’Cause he’s dead,” he said, and he laughed hard at his joke. He was an old man with wispy white hair and deep eye sockets, and he looked as though he’d be joining Leveque before too many months passed. His pants were loose and he held them up with suspenders. His flannel shirt hung on him, too. Either he got his clothes at a thrift shop or he’d lost a lot of weight recently.

  Reading my mind, he said, “I been sick, but don’t worry. It ain’t catching.”

  “I’m more afraid of the knife.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” he said. He showed me a French chef’s knife with a wooden handle and a ten-inch carbon-steel blade. “Come on in,” he said. “I ain’t about to cut you, for Christ’s sake.” He led the way, setting the knife down on a little table near the door.

  His apartment was tiny, two narrow little rooms. The only illumination came from a three-bulb ceiling fixture in the larger room. Two of the bulbs had burned out and the remaining one couldn’t have been more than forty watts. He kept the place tidy but it had a smell to it, an odor of age and illness.

  “Arnie Leveque,” he said. “How’d you know him?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “No?” He yanked a handkerchief out of his back pocket and coughed into it. “Dammit,” he said. “The bastards cut me from asshole to appetite but it didn’t do no good. I waited too long. See, I was afraid of what they’d find.” He laughed harshly. “Well, I was right, wasn’t I?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “He was okay, Leveque. French Canadian, but he musta been born here because he talked like anybody else.”

  “Did he live here a long time?”

  “What’s a long time? I been here forty-two years. Can you believe that? Forty-two years in this shithole. Be forty-three years in September, but I expect to be out of here by then. Moved to smaller quarters.” He laughed again and it turned into a coughing fit and he reached for the handkerchief. He got the cough under control and said, “Smaller quarters, like a box about six feet long, you know what I mean?”

  “I guess it helps to joke about it.”

  “Naw, it don’t help,” he said. “Nothing helps. I guess Arnie lived here about ten years. Give or take, you know? He kept to his room a lot. Of course the way he was you wouldn’t expect him to go tap-dancing down the street.” I must have looked puzzled, because he said, “Oh, I forgot, you didn’t know him. He was fat as a pig, Arnie was.” He put his hands out in front of him and drew them apart as he lowered them. “Pear-shaped. Waddled like a duck. He was up on three, too, so he had two flights of stairs to climb if he went anywhere.”

  “How old was he?”

  “I don’t know. Forty? It’s hard to tell when somebody’s fat like that.”

  “What did he do?”

  “For a living? I don’t know. Had a job he went to. Then he wasn’t going out so much.”

  “I understand he liked movies.”

  “Oh, he sure did. He had one of those things, what the hell do they call it, you watch movies on your TV set.”

  “A VCR.”

  “It woulda come to me in a minute.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Leveque? Ain’t you paying attention? He died.”

  “How?”

  “They killed him,” he said. “What do you think?”

  IT was a generic they, as it turned out. Arnold Leveque had died on the street, presumably the victim of a mugging. It was getting worse every year, the old man told me, what with people smoking crack and living on the street. They would kill you for subway fare, he said, and think nothing of it.

  I asked when all this had happened, and he said it must have been a year ago. I said that Leveque had still been alive in April—Fielding’s records indicated his most recent transaction had been on the nineteenth of that month—and he said he didn’t have that good a head for dates anymore.

  He told me how to find the super. “She don’t do much,” he said. “She collects the rents, that’s about all.” When I asked his name he said it was Gus, and when I asked his last name a sly look came over his face. “Just Gus is good enough. Why tell you my name when you ain’t told me yours?”

  I gave him one of my cards. He held it at arm’s length and squinted at it, reading my name aloud. He asked if he could keep the card and I said he could.

  “When I meet up with Arnie,” he said, “I’ll tell him you was looking for him.” And he laughed and laughed.

  GUS’s last name was Giesekind. I found that out by checking his mailbox, which shows I’m no slouch as a detective. The super’s name was Herta Eigen, and I found her two doors up the street where she had a basement apartment. She was a small woman, barely five feet tall, with a Central European accent and a wary, suspicious little face. She flexed her fingers as she talked. They were misshapen by arthritis but moved nimbly enough.

  “The cops came,” she said. “Took me downtown somewhere, made me look at him.”

  “To identify him?”

  She nodded. “ ‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘That’s Leveque.’ They bring me back here and I got to let them into his room. They walked in and I walked in after them. ‘You can go now, Mrs. Eigen.’ ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay.’ Because some of them are all right but some of them would steal the money off a dead man’s eyes. Is that the expression?”

  “Yes.”

  “The pennies off a dead man’s eyes. Pennies, not money.” She sighed. “So they finish poking around and I let them out and lock up after them, and I ask what do I do now, will somebody come for his things, and they say they’ll be in touch. Which they never were.”

  “You never heard from them?”

  “Nothing. Nobody tells me if his people are coming for his belongings, or what I’m supposed to do. When I didn’t hear from them I called the precinct. They don’t know what I’m talking about. I guess so many people get murdered nobody can bother to keep track.” She shrugged. “Me, I got an apartment, I got to rent it, you know? I left the furniture, I brought everything else down here. When nobody came I got rid of it.”

  “You sold the videocassettes.”

  “The movies? I took them over on Broadway, he gave me a few dollars. Was that wrong?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I wasn�
�t stealing. If he had family I would give it all to them, but he had nobody. He lived here for many years, Mr. Leveque. He was here already when I got this job.”

  “When was that?”

  “Six years ago. Wait a minute, I’m wrong, seven years.”

  “You’re just the superintendent?”

  “What else should I be, the queen of England?”

  “I knew a woman who was a landlady but she let on to the tenants that she was only the super.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “I own the building, that’s why I live in the basement. I’m a rich woman, I just have this love for living in the ground like a mole.”

  “Who does own the building?”

  “I don’t know.” I looked at her and she said, “Sue me, I don’t know. Who knows? There’s a management company that hired me. I collect the rent, I give it to them, they do whatever they want with it. The landlord I never met. Does it matter who it is?”

  I couldn’t see how. I asked when Arnold Leveque had died.

  “Last spring,” she said. “Closer than that I couldn’t tell you.”

  * * *

  I went back to my hotel room and turned on the TV. Three different channels had college basketball games. It was too frenzied and I couldn’t bear to watch. I found a tennis match on one of the cable channels and it was restful by comparison. I don’t know that it would be accurate to say that I watched it, but I did sit in front of the set with my eyes open while they hit the ball back and forth over the net.

  I met Jim for dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Ninth Avenue. We often had Sunday dinner there. The place never filled up and they didn’t care how long we sat there or how many times they had to refill our teapot. The food’s not bad, and I don’t know why they don’t do more business.

  He said, “Did you happen to read the Times today? There was an article, an interview with this Catholic priest who writes hot novels. I can’t think of his name.”

  “I know who you mean.”

  “He had this telephone poll to back him up, and he said how only ten percent of the married population of this country have ever committed adultery. Nobody cheats, that’s his contention, and he can prove it because somebody called a bunch of people on the phone and that’s what they told him.”