A Dance at the Slaughterhouse Read online

  “I’m shocked.”

  “Yeah, I figured you’d be. No, I don’t guess they gave back the confiscated merchandise. But we had a guy just the other day, a street dealer, we locked him up and he walked on a technicality, and he wants to know can he have his dope back.”

  “Oh, come on, Joe.”

  “I swear to God. So Nickerson says to him, ‘Look, Maurice, if I give you your dope back then I’ll have to grab you for possession.’ Just shucking him, you know? And the asshole says, ‘No, man, you can’t do that. Where’s your probable cause?’ Nick says what do you mean probable cause, my probable cause is I just handed you the fucking dope an’ I seen you put it in your pocket. Maurice says no, it’d never stand up, I’d skate. And do you want to know something? I think he’s probably right.”

  * * *

  JOE gave me the address of the Times Square store where Leveque had taken his brief fall. It was on the block between Eighth and Broadway, right on the Deuce, and since I could tell that from the number I didn’t see any reason why I should go down there and look at it. I didn’t know if he’d worked there for a day or a year and there was no way I was going to find out. Even if they wanted to tell me, it was unlikely that anybody knew.

  I went over my notes for a few minutes, then leaned back and put my feet up. When I closed my eyes I got a quick flash of the man in Maspeth, the perfect father, smoothing his kid’s hair back.

  I decided I was reading too much into a gesture. I really didn’t have a clue what the guy in the movie looked like under all that black rubber. Maybe the boy had looked like the youth in the film, maybe that was what had triggered my memory.

  And even if it was the right guy? How was I going to find him by sniffing the fading spoor of some sad bastard who’d been dead for the better part of a year?

  Thursday I’d seen them at the fights. It was Monday now. If it was his son, if the whole thing was innocent, then I was just spinning my wheels. If not, then I was too late.

  If he’d planned to kill the boy, to spill his blood down the drain in the floor, it was odds-on he’d done it by now.

  But why take him to the fights in the first place? Maybe he liked to work out an elaborate little psychodrama, maybe he had a protracted affair with a victim first. That would explain why the boy in the film had been so unafraid, even blasé about being tied up on a torture rack.

  If the boy was dead already there was nothing I could do for him. If he was alive there wasn’t much I could do, either, because I was light years from identifying and locating Rubber Man and I was closing on him at a snail’s pace.

  All I had was a dead man. And what did I have there? Leveque died with a tape, and the tape showed Rubber Man killing a boy. Leveque had died violently, probably but not necessarily the victim of an ordinary mugging in a part of town where muggings were commonplace. Leveque had worked at a porno shop. He’d worked there off the books, so he could have worked there for years, except that Gus Giesekind had said that he stayed in most of the time, unlike a man with a regular job.

  And his last regular job—

  I reached for the phone book and looked up a number. When the machine answered I left a message. Then I grabbed my coat and headed over to Armstrong’s.

  HE was at the bar when I walked in, a slender man with a goatee and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a brown corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches and smoking a pipe with a curved stem. He would have looked perfectly at home in Paris, sipping an aperitif in a café on the Left Bank. Instead he was drinking Canadian ale in a Fifty-seventh Street saloon, but he didn’t look out of place.

  “Manny,” I said, “I just left you a message.”

  “I know,” he said. “It was still recording when I walked in the door. You said you’d look for me here, so I walked right back out the door again. I didn’t have to stop to put my coat on because I hadn’t had time to take it off. And, since I live closer to this joint than you do—”

  “You got here first.”

  “So it would appear. Shall we get a table? It’s good to see you, Matt. I don’t see enough of you.”

  We used to see each other almost daily when Jimmy’s old Ninth Avenue place had been a second home to me. Manny Karesh had been a regular there, dropping in for an hour or so, sometimes hanging around for a whole evening. He was a technician at CBS and lived around the corner. Never a heavy drinker, he came to Jimmy’s as much for the food as the beer, and more than either for the company.

  We took a table and I ordered coffee and a hamburger and we brought each other up to date. He’d retired, he told me, and I said I’d heard something to that effect.

  “I’m working as much as ever,” he said. “Free-lancing, sometimes for my former employers and for anyone else who’ll hire me. I have all the work I could want, and at the same time I’m collecting my pension.”

  “Speaking of CBS,” I said.

  “Were we?”

  “Well, we are now. There’s a fellow I want to ask you about because you might have known him some years ago. He worked there for three years and left in the fall of ’82.”

  He took his pipe from his mouth and nodded. “Arnie Leveque,” he said. “So he called you after all. I had wondered if he would. Why are you looking so puzzled?”

  “Why would he call me?”

  “You mean he didn’t call you? Then why—”

  “You first. Why would he have called?”

  “Because he wanted a private detective. I ran into him on a shoot. It must have been, oh, six months ago.”

  Longer than that, I thought.

  “And I don’t know how it came up, but he wanted to know if I could recommend a detective, although I couldn’t swear he used the word. I said that I knew a fellow, an ex-cop who lived right here in the neighborhood, and I gave him your name and said I didn’t know your number offhand, but you lived at the Northwestern. You’re still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re still doing that sort of work? I hope it was all right to give out your name.”

  “Of course it was,” I said. “I appreciate it. But he never called me.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen him since then, Matt, and I’m sure it’s been six months, so if you haven’t heard from him by now you probably won’t.”

  “I’m sure I won’t,” I said, “and I’m pretty sure it’s been more than six months. He’s been dead since last May.”

  “You’re not serious. He’s dead? He was a young man. He carried far too much weight, of course, but even so.” He took a sip of beer. “What happened to him?”

  “He was killed.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. How?”

  “Stabbed by a mugger. Apparently.”

  “ ‘Apparently.’ There’s a suspicion of foul play?”

  “Mugging’s reasonably foul play all by itself, but no, there’s no official suspicion. Leveque ties into something I’m working on, or at least he may. Why did he want a private detective?”

  “He didn’t say.” He frowned. “I didn’t know him all that well. When he started at CBS he was young and eager. He was a technical assistant, part of a camera crew. I don’t think he was with us very long.”

  “Three years.”

  “I would have said less than that.”

  “Why did he leave?”

  He tugged at his beard. “My sense of it is that we let him go.”

  “Do you remember why?”

  “I doubt that I’d have known in the first place. I don’t know that he blotted his copybook, as our British cousins would say, but young Arnold never had what you might call a winning personality. He was a sort of overgrown nerd, which is not a word you’ll hear me use often. Still, that’s what he was, and he tended to be somewhat casual about matters of personal hygiene. Went a little long between shaves, and wore the same shirt a day or two more than custom dictates. And of course he was fat. Some men are as fat but carry their weight well. Arnold, alas, was not of their number.”r />
  “And afterward he got free-lance work?”

  “Well, that’s what he was doing the last time I ran into him. On the other hand, I’ve been free-lancing for several years now and I can think of only one other time we were on the same shoot. I guess he must have worked steadily enough, though, because he couldn’t have missed many meals.”

  “He clerked for a while in a Times Square bookstore.”

  “You know,” he said, “I can believe it. It somehow fits him. There was always something furtive about Arnie, something damp-palmed and out of breath. I can imagine someone slipping stealthily into one of those places and encountering Arnie behind the counter, rubbing his hands together and giving you a sly look.” He winced. “My God, the man’s dead, and look how I’m talking about him.” He struck a match and got his pipe going again. “I’ve made him sound like the evil lab assistant in a Frankenstein remake. Well, he’d be a good choice for the part. Always speak ill of the dead, as my sainted mother used to advise me. Because they’re in no position to get back at you.”

  Chapter 11

  “It’s kind of spooky,” Elaine said. “He died before he could get in touch with you. Then he reached out to you from beyond the grave.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, what else would you call it? There’s a tape in his room when he dies, and his landlady sells it—”

  “She’s only a super.”

  “—to a video store, and they rent it out to someone who runs straight to you with it. What are the odds on that?”

  “We’re all in the neighborhood. Me, Manny, Leveque, Will Haberman, the video place. That puts the needle in a fairly small haystack.”

  “Uh-huh. What did you tell me coincidence is? God trying to maintain His anonymity?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  I’d called her after I left Manny at Armstrong’s. She had a cold coming on, she said, and she’d been feeling achy and crummy and sneezy all day. “All those dwarfs,” she said, “except Bashful.” She was taking a lot of vitamin C and drinking hot water with lemon juice. She said, “What do you really think happened with Leveque? How does he fit in?”

  “I think he was the cameraman,” I said. “There had to be a fourth person in the room when they made that movie. The camera moved around, zoomed in and out. You can make a home video by positioning the camera and performing in front of it, but that’s not what they did, and a lot of the time they were both in the shot at the same time and the camera was moving around to cover the action.”

  “I never noticed. I was too centered on what was happening.”

  “You only saw it once. I saw it two more times the other day, don’t forget.”

  “So you could concentrate on the fine points.”

  “Leveque had a background in video. He worked for three years at a network, admittedly in a menial capacity. He got some work since then on a free-lance basis. And he clerked in a Times Square bookstore and got arrested during one of Koch’s cleanup campaigns. If you were going to pick someone to film a dirty movie, he’d be a logical choice.”

  “But would you let him film you committing murder?”

  “Maybe they had enough on him so that they didn’t have to worry. Maybe the murder was unplanned, maybe they were just going to hurt the boy a little and they got carried away. It doesn’t matter. The boy got killed and the film got made, and if Leveque didn’t operate the camcorder somebody else did.”

  “And he wound up with a tape.”

  “And he concealed it,” I said. “According to Herta Eigen, the only tapes in his apartment were the ones she sold to Fielding. That doesn’t figure. Somebody in the trade would be certain to have a lot of noncommercial cassettes around. He was an old film buff, he probably taped things off TV all the time. He probably kept copies of his own camera work, pornographic or otherwise. And he would have had a few blank cassettes around in case he found a use for them.”

  “You think she was lying?”

  “No, what I think is that somebody went to his place on Columbus Avenue while his body temperature was dropping in an alley on West Forty-ninth. His watch and wallet were missing, which suggests robbery, but so were his keys. I think whoever killed him took his keys and went to his apartment and walked out with every cassette except the commercial recordings.”

  “Why didn’t they just take everything?”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to watch three versions of The Maltese Falcon. They probably had enough to carry with the unmarked and homemade material. Why take something that obviously wasn’t what they were looking for?”

  “And the tape they were looking for is the one we saw?”

  “Well, he could have done other work for Rubber Man and he could have kept copies of everything. But he made a particular point of hiding this one. He not only used a commercial film cassette but he let the original movie run for fifteen minutes before he started copying the other one onto the reel. Anybody who gave it a quick check would have seen it was The Dirty Dozen and tossed it aside.”

  “It must have been a real shock to your friend. He and his wife were watching Lee Marvin and the boys, and all of a sudden—”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Why did he conceal the tape so carefully?”

  “Because he was scared. That’s probably the same reason he asked Manny about a private detective.”

  “And before he could call you—”

  “I don’t know that he ever would have called,” I said. “I just spoke to Manny again before I called you. He went home and checked his calendar for last year, and he was able to pinpoint his conversation with Leveque because he remembered what job they both worked on. He had that talk with Leveque sometime during the third week in April, and Leveque didn’t get killed until the ninth of May. He may have asked other people for recommendations. He may have called somebody else, or he may have decided he could handle it by himself.”

  “What was he trying to handle? Blackmail?”

  “That’s certainly a possibility. Maybe he filmed a lot of nasty scenes, maybe Rubber Man wasn’t the person he was blackmailing. Maybe somebody else killed him. He may have considered calling me but he never did. He wasn’t my client and it’s not my job to solve his murder.” A couple of lights winked on in the building across the street. I said, “It’s not my job to do anything about Rubber Man, either. Thurman’s my job and I’m not doing anything about him.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if it all tied together?”

  “I thought of that,” I admitted.

  “And?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  She started to say something, sneezed, and said she hoped what she had wasn’t the flu. I said I’d see her tomorrow, and to stay with the vitamin C and the lemon juice. She said she would, even though she didn’t honestly believe it did you the least bit of good.

  I sat there for a while looking out the window. It was supposed to turn colder that night, with snow possible toward morning. I picked up The Newgate Calendar and read about a highwayman named Dick Turpin who had been something of a folk hero in his day, although it was hard to figure out why.

  Around a quarter to eight I made a couple of calls and managed to reach Ray Galindez, a young police artist who had sat down with me and Elaine and sketched a man who’d threatened to kill us both. I told him I had some work for him if he had an hour or two to spare. He said he could make some time in the morning, and we arranged to meet in the lobby of the Northwestern at ten.

  I went to the eight-thirty meeting at St. Paul’s and straight home afterward. I thought I’d get to bed early, but instead I wound up sitting up for hours. I would read a paragraph or two about some cutthroat who’d been righteously hanged a couple of centuries ago, then put the book down and stare out the window.

  I finally went to bed around three. It never did snow that night.

  RAY Galindez showed up right on time and we went upstairs to my room. He propped his briefcas
e on the bed and took out a sketch pad and some soft pencils and an Art-Gum eraser. “After I talked with you last night,” he said, “I could picture the guy I sketched for you last time. Did you ever catch him?”

  “No, but I stopped looking. He killed himself.”

  “That right? So I guess you never saw him to compare him to the sketch.”

  I had, but I couldn’t say so. “The sketch was right on the money,” I said. “I showed it to a lot of people who recognized him on the basis of it.”

  He was pleased. “You still in touch with that woman? I can picture her apartment, all black and white, that view out over the river. Beautiful place.”

  “I’m in touch with her,” I said. “As a matter of fact I see quite a bit of her.”

  “Oh yeah? A very nice lady. She still in the same place? She must be, a person’d be crazy to move from a place like that.”

  I said she was. “And she has the sketch you did.”

  “The sketch I did. Of that guy? That sketch?”

  “Framed on the wall. She says it’s a whole category of art the world has overlooked, and after I had the sketch photocopied she got it framed and hung it.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Swear to God. She had it in the living room but I got her to move it to the bathroom. Otherwise wherever you sat you felt as though he was looking right at you. I’m not putting you on, Ray, she’s got it in a nice aluminum frame with non-glare glass and all.”

  “Jeez,” he said. “I never heard of anything like that.”

  “Well, she’s an unusual lady.”

  “I guess. You know, it’s kind of nice to hear that. I mean, she’s a woman with good taste. I remember the painting she had on the wall.” He described the large abstract oil on the wall near the window, and I told him he had a hell of a memory. “Well, art,” he said. “That’s, you know, like my thing.” He turned away, a little embarrassed. “Well, who’ve you got for me today? A real bad guy?”