A Dance at the Slaughterhouse Read online

  Mick attended sporadically, coming every day for a week or two, then staying away for a month. I had joined him a handful of times since I’d come to know him. I wasn’t sure why he went, and I certainly didn’t know why I sometimes tagged along.

  This occasion was like all the others. I followed the service in the book and picked up my cues from the others, standing when they stood, kneeling when they knelt, mouthing the appropriate responses. When the young priest handed out the Communion wafers Mick and I stayed where we were. As far as I could tell, everybody else approached the altar and received the Host.

  Outside again Mick said, “Will you look at that?”

  It was snowing. Big soft flakes floated slowly down. It must have started just after we entered the old church. There was already a light dusting of snow on the church steps, and on the sidewalk.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll run you home.”

  Chapter 14

  I woke up around two after five hours of a restless, dream-ridden sleep, most of it suspended just a degree or two below the horizon of consciousness. All that coffee may have had something to do with it, much of it on a stomach unsupplied with food since the spinach pie at Tiffany’s.

  I rang downstairs and told the desk clerk he could put through my calls again. The phone rang while I was in the shower. I called down again to see who it was, and the clerk said there was no message. “You had a few calls during the morning,” he said, “but no messages.”

  I shaved and dressed and went out for breakfast. The snow had stopped falling but it was still fresh and white where human and vehicular traffic hadn’t yet turned it to slush. I bought a paper and carried it back to the room. I read the paper and looked out the window at the snow on rooftops and window ledges. We’d had about three inches of it, enough to muffle some of the noise of the city. It was something pretty to look at while I waited for the phone to ring.

  The first to get through was Elaine, and I asked her if she’d tried earlier. She hadn’t. I asked her how she was feeling.

  “Not great,” she said. “I’m a little feverish and I’ve got diarrhea, which is just the body trying to get rid of everything it doesn’t need. That seems to include everything but bones and blood vessels.”

  “Do you think you ought to see a doctor?”

  “What for? He’ll tell me I’ve got this crud that’s going around, and I already know that. ‘Keep warm, drink lots of fluids.’ Right. The thing is, see, I’m reading this book by Borges, he’s this Argentinian writer who’s blind. He’s also dead, but—”

  “But he wasn’t when he wrote it.”

  “Right. And his work is kind of surreal and spacy, and I don’t know where the writing leaves off and the fever starts, if you know what I mean. Part of the time it seems to me that this is not the best condition to be in while I read this stuff, and other times I think it’s the only way to do it.”

  I filled her in on some of what happened since our last conversation. I told her about the run-in with Thurman at Paris Green, and that I’d spent a long night with Mick Ballou.

  “Oh, well,” she said. “Boys will be boys.”

  I went back to the paper. There were two stories that particularly struck me. One reported that a jury had acquitted an alleged mob boss charged with ordering an assault on a union official. The acquittal had been expected, especially in view of the fact that the victim, shot several times in both legs, had seen fit to testify for the defense, and there was a photo of the dapper defendant surrounded by well-wishers and fans on his way out of the courthouse. This was the third time he’d been brought to trial in the past four years, and the third time he’d skated. He was, the reporter said, something of a folk hero.

  The other story concerned a workingman who’d been leaving the subway station with his four-year-old daughter when a homeless person, apparently deranged, attacked the pair and spat at them. In the course of defending himself the father pounded the lunatic’s head against the ground, and when it was over the homeless man was dead. A spokesman for the DA’s office had announced the decision to prosecute the father for manslaughter. They ran a photo of him, looking confused and besieged. He wasn’t dapper, and seemed an unlikely folk hero.

  I put the paper down and the phone rang again. I picked it up and a voice said, “Is this where it’s at?”

  It took me a moment. Then I said, “TJ?”

  “Where it’s at, Matt. Everybody want to know who’s this dude, hangin’ loose on the Deuce, passin’ out cards an’ askin’ everybody where’s TJ. I was at the movies, man, watchin’ this kung fu shit. You know how to do that shit?”

  “No.”

  “That is some wild shit, man. Like to learn me some of that sometime.”

  I gave him my address and asked him if he could come up. “I don’t know,” he said. “What kind of hotel? One of them big fancy ones?”

  “Not fancy at all. They won’t give you a hard time downstairs. If they do, just tell them to call me on the house phone.”

  “I guess that be all right.”

  I hung up, and it rang again almost immediately. It was Maggie Hillstrom, the woman from Testament House. She had shown my sketches to kids and staff members at both Old Testament House and New Testament House. No one could identify the younger boy or the man, although some of the kids had said that either or both of them looked familiar.

  “But I don’t know how much stock to place in that,” she said. “More to the point, we were able to identify the older boy. He never actually lived here but he did stay overnight on several occasions.”

  “Did you manage to come up with a name for him?”

  “Happy,” she said. “That’s what he called himself. It seems ironic, doesn’t it, and in a shabby way. I don’t know if that was a long-standing nickname or if he acquired it here on the street. The consensus is that he was from the South or Southwest. A staff member seems to recall that he said he was from Texas, but a boy who knew him is just as certain he came from North Carolina. Of course he may have said different things to different people.”

  He was a hustler, she said. He went with men for money and took drugs when he could afford them. No one could recall having seen him within the past year.

  “They are forever disappearing,” she said. “It’s normal not to see them for a few days, and then suddenly you’ll realize you haven’t seen someone for a week or two weeks or a month. And sometimes they come back and sometimes they don’t, and you never know if the next place they went to was better or worse for them.” She sighed. “One boy told me he thought Happy had most likely gone home. And, in a manner of speaking, perhaps he has.”

  THE next call was from the desk, announcing TJ’s arrival. I told them to send him on up and met him at the elevator. I took him to my room and he moved around it like a dancer, checking it out. “Hey, this is cool,” he said. “See the Trade Center from here, can’t you? An’ you got your own bathroom. Must be nice.”

  As far as I could tell he was wearing the same outfit I’d seen him in before. The denim jacket that had looked too warm for the summer now appeared unequal to the winter’s cold. His high-top sneakers looked new, and he had added a royal-blue watch cap.

  I handed him the sketches. He glanced at the top one and looked up at me, his eyes wary. He said, “You want to draw my picture? Why you laughin’?”

  “I’m sure you’d make a fine model,” I said, “but I’m no artist.”

  “You didn’t draw these here?” He looked at each in turn, examined the signature. “Raymond something. What do you say, Ray? What’s happenin’?”

  “Do you recognize any of them?”

  He said he didn’t, and I ran it down for him. “The older boy’s name is Happy,” I said. “I think he’s dead.”

  “You think they both be dead. Don’t you?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “What you want to know about them?”

  “Their names. Where they’re from.”

  “You
already know his name, you said. Happy, you said.”

  “I figure his name is Happy like your name is TJ.”

  He gave me a look. “You say TJ,” he said, “everybody gone know who you be referrin’ to.” He looked at the sketch again. “You sayin’ Happy’s his street name.”

  “That’s right.”

  “If that’s his name on the street, that the only name the street gone know. Who give you that name, Testament House?”

  I nodded. “They said he didn’t live there but he stayed there a couple of nights.”

  “Yeah, well, they be good people, but not everybody can handle the rules an’ shit, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Did you ever stay there, TJ?”

  “Shit, why’d I do that? I don’t need no place like that. I got a place where I live, man.”

  “Where?”

  “Never mind where. Long as I can find it, that’s all that matters.” He shuffled through the sketches. Casually he said, “I seen this man.”

  “Where?”

  “I dunno. On the Deuce, but don’t be askin’ me where or when.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, yanked his cap off, turned it over in his hands. He said, “What you want from me, man?”

  I took a twenty from my wallet and held it out to him. He didn’t move to take it, and his eyes repeated his question. What did I want from him?

  I said, “You know the Deuce and the bus terminal and the kids on the street. You could go places I don’t know about and talk to people who wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Tha’s a lot for twenty dollars.” He grinned. “Other time I seen you, you gimme fi’ dollars and I didn’t do nothin’.”

  “You haven’t done anything this time either,” I said.

  “Could take a lot of time, though. Jivin’ with the people, goin’ here an’ there.” I started to take back the twenty and his hand moved to snatch it from me. “Don’t be doin’ that,” he said. “I didn’t say no, did I? Just tuggin’ you ’round some is all.” He looked around the room. “But I don’t guess you’s rich, huh?”

  I had to laugh. “No,” I said. “Not quite.”

  CHANCE called. He had asked a few people in the fight crowd, and some had recalled an apparent father and son at ringside Thursday. No one remembered having seen the pair before, in Maspeth or elsewhere. I said the man would probably not have had the boy along on other occasions, and he said it was the two of them that people remembered. “So it’s not like the people I talked to recognized him,” he said. “Are you going back out there tomorrow night?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or you could watch it on television. You might see him if he’s in the first row again.”

  We didn’t stay on the phone long because I wanted to keep the line open. I hung up and waited, and Danny Boy Bell was the next to call. “I’ll be having dinner at Poogan’s,” he said. “Why don’t you join me? You know how I hate to eat alone.”

  “You’ve got something?”

  “Nothing remarkable,” he said, “but you have to eat dinner sometime, don’t you? Eight o’clock.”

  I hung up and checked the time. It was five o’clock. I turned on the TV and watched the opening of the news and turned it off when I realized I wasn’t paying attention. I picked up the phone and dialed Thurman’s number. When the machine picked up I didn’t say anything but I didn’t hang up, either. I sat there with the line open for thirty seconds or so before I finally broke the connection.

  I picked up The Newgate Calendar and the phone rang almost immediately. I grabbed it and said hello and it was Jim Faber.

  “Oh, hi,” I said.

  “You sound disappointed.”

  “I’ve been waiting on a call all afternoon,” I said.

  “Well, I won’t keep you,” he said. “It’s not important. Will you be going to St. Paul’s tonight?”

  “I don’t think so. I have to meet somebody at eight on Seventy-second Street and I don’t know how long that’ll last. Anyway, I went last night.”

  “That’s funny, I looked for you and didn’t see you there.”

  “I was downtown, I went to Perry Street.”

  “Oh, did you? That’s where I wound up Sunday night. The perfect choice, you can say anything there and nobody gives a rat’s ass. I said terrible things about Bev and felt a hundred percent better for it. Was Helen there last night? Did she tell you about the holdup?”

  “What holdup?”

  “At Perry Street. Look, you’re expecting a call, I don’t want to keep you.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Somebody held up Perry Street? What could they get? They don’t even have coffee there anymore.”

  “Well, it wasn’t a brilliantly conceived crime. It was their Friday night step meeting a week or two ago. A fellow named Bruce was speaking. I don’t know if you know him and it’s not important. Anyway, he gave his qualification for twenty minutes, and then some wacko stood up and announced that he had come to that meeting a year earlier and put forty dollars in the basket by mistake, and he had a gun in his pocket, and if he didn’t get his forty dollars back he was going to start blowing people away.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Wait, here’s the good part. Bruce told him, ‘I’m sorry, you’re out of order, we can’t interrupt the meeting for something like that. You’ll have to wait until the break at a quarter of nine.’ The guy starts to say something and Bruce bangs the gavel on that sort of podium they have there and tells him to sit down and calls on somebody else, and the meeting goes on.”

  “And the nut just sits there?”

  “I guess he figured he had no choice. Rules are rules, right? Then another fellow, a guy named Harry, went over to him and asked him if he wanted some coffee or some cigarettes, and the nut allowed as to how coffee would be nice. ‘I’ll just slip out and get you some,’ Harry whispered, and he slipped out and around the corner to the police station, I think there’s one fairly close—”

  “The Sixth Precinct’s just a couple blocks away on West Tenth.”

  “Then that’s where he went, and he came back with a couple of New York’s Finest, and they bundled up the lunatic and took him away. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Where’s my forty dollars? Where’s my coffee?’ Only at Perry Street.”

  “Oh, that could happen anywhere, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not so sure of that. I can think of an Upper East Side meeting where they would have taken up a collection for the sonofabitch and then tried to see if they could find him an apartment. Well, I won’t keep you, I know you’re expecting a call. But I had to pass that on.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” I said.

  JUST sitting still can drive you crazy. But I didn’t want to go anywhere. I knew he was going to call and I didn’t want to miss it.

  The phone rang at six-thirty. I grabbed it and said hello and there was no answer. I said hello again and waited. I could tell the line was open. I said hello a third time and the connection was broken.

  I picked up my book and put it down again, and then I looked in my notebook and dialed Lyman Warriner in Cambridge. “I know I told you I wouldn’t be filing any progress reports,” I said, “but I wanted to let you know that there’s been some progress. I have a pretty good idea at this point of what happened.”

  “He’s guilty, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t think there’s any question of that,” I said. “Not in my mind and not in his.”

  “In his?”

  “Something’s working on him, guilt or fear or both. He called here a minute ago. He didn’t say a word. He’s scared to talk but he’s also scared not to talk and that’s why he called. I’m positive he’ll call again.”

  “You sound as though you expect him to confess.”

  “I think he wants to. At the same time I’m sure he’s afraid to. I’m not sure why I called you, Lyman. I probably should have waited until everything’s resolved.”

  “No, I’m glad you called.” />
  “I have a feeling once things start to move they’re going to move fast.” I hesitated. “Your sister’s murder is only part of it.”

  “Really.”

  “That’s how it looks at this stage. I’ll let you know when I have something more concrete. But in the meantime I wanted to keep you in the picture.”

  THERE was another call at seven. I picked it up and said hello and there was a click right away as he hung up. I called back right away, dialing the number of the phone at his apartment. It rang four times and his machine picked up. I hung up.

  At seven-thirty he called again. I said hello and when there was no reply I said, “I know who you are. You can go ahead and talk, it’s all right.”

  Silence.

  “I have to go out now,” I said. “I’ll be back here at ten o’clock. Call me at ten.”

  I could hear him breathing.

  “Ten o’clock,” I said, and broke the connection. I waited for ten minutes on the off chance that he’d call back right away and be ready to spill it, but no, that was it for now. I grabbed my coat and went to keep my dinner date with Danny Boy.

  Chapter 15

  “Five Borough Cable,” Danny Boy said. “A good idea, based on the premise that New Yorkers might go for sports programming with a little more local interest than celebrity bass fishing and Australian rules football. But they had a slow start and they made a very common mistake. They were undercapitalized.

  “Just about a year ago they solved that problem by selling a substantial share to a pair of brothers with a last name I can’t pronounce, but which I’ve been assured is Iranian. That’s all anyone knows about them, aside from the fact that they live in Los Angeles, and are represented by an attorney in that city.