A Dance at the Slaughter House Read online

Page 26

 

  "Theres a pretty thought. "

  "In the name of Jesus," he said, "were all going to die, arent we? So why not do any bloody thing we please with each other? Is that it? Is that how the world works?"

  "I dont know how the world works. "

  "No, and neither do I. And I dont know how you get through it on fucking coffee, I swear I dont. If I didnt have this-"

  He filled his glass.

  LATER we were talking about black men. He had little use for them and I let him tell me why. "Now theres some who are all right," he said. "Ill grant you that. What was the name of that fellow we met at the fights?"

  "Chance. "

  "I liked him," he said, "but youd have to say hes another type entirely from the usual run. Hes educated, hes a gentleman, hes a professional man. "

  "Do you know how I got to know him?"

  "At his place of business, I would suppose. Or didnt you say you met him at the fights?"

  "Thats where we met, but there was a business reason for the meeting. That was before Chance was an art dealer. He was a pimp then. One of his whores got killed by a lunatic with a machete, and he hired me to look into it. "

  "Hes a pimp, then. "

  "Not anymore. Now hes an art dealer. "

  "And a friend of yours. "

  "And a friend of mine. "

  "You have an odd taste in friends. Whats so funny?"

  " An odd taste in friends. A cop I know said that to me. "

  "So?"

  "He was talking about you. "

  "Was he now?" He laughed. "Ah, well. Hard to argue with that, isnt it?"

  ON a night like that the stories come easy, and the silences between the stories are easy, too. He talked about his father and mother, both long gone, and about his brother Dennis who had died in Vietnam. There were two other brothers, one a lawyer and real estate broker in White Plains, the other selling cars in Medford, Oregon.

  "At least he was the last I heard of him," he said. "He was going to be a priest, Francis was, but he lasted less than a year at the seminary. I learned I liked the girls and the gargle too much. Hell, theres priests that have their share of both. He tried one thing and another and two years ago he was in Oregon selling Plymouths. Its great here, Mickey, come out and see me. But I never did, and hes likely gone somewhere else by now. I think the poor bastard still wishes he was a priest, even though his faiths long since lost. Can you understand that?"

  "I think so. "

  "Were you raised Catholic? You werent, were you?"

  "No. There were Catholics and Protestants in the family but nobody worked at it very hard. I grew up not going to church and wouldnt have known which one to go to. I even had one grandparent who was half-Jewish. "

  "Is that so? You could have been a lawyer like Rosenstein. "

  He told the story hed started Thursday night, about the man who owned the factory in Maspeth where they assembled staple removers. The man had incurred gambling debts and wanted Mick to burn the place so he could collect the insurance. The arsonist Mick used had made a mistake and torched the place directly across the street instead. When Mick told the arsonist of his error the man insisted it was no problem, hed go back the next night and do it right. And hed include an extra for goodwill, he offered. Hed burn the mans house down and not charge him for it.

  I told a story I hadnt thought of in years. "I was fresh out of the Academy," I said, "and they teamed me up with an old hairbag named Vince Mahaffey. He must have had thirty years in and he never made plainclothes and never wanted to. He taught me plenty, including things they probably didnt want me to learn, like the difference between clean graft and dirty graft and how to get as much of the first kind as you can. He drank like a fish and ate like a pig and he smoked those little Italian cigars. Guinea stinkers, he called them. I thought you had to be in one of the five families to smoke those things. He was a hell of a role model, Vince was.

  "One night we caught one, a domestic disturbance, the neighbors called it in. This was in Brooklyn, in Park Slope. Its all gentrified there now, but this was before any of that got started. It was an ordinary white working-class neighborhood then.

  "The apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up, and Mahaffey had to stop a couple of times along the way. Finally were standing in front of the door and you cant hear a thing. Ah, shit, Vince said. What do you bet he killed her? Now hell be crying and yanking his hair out and well have to take him in.

  "But we rang the bell and they both answered it, a man and a woman. He was a big guy around thirty-five, a construction worker, and she looked like a girl whod been pretty in high school and let herself go. And they were surprised to hear that wed had a complaint. Oh, had they been making too much noise? Well, maybe theyd been playing the TV a little loud. It wasnt even on now, the whole place was silent as a grave. Mahaffey pushed it the least little bit, said wed had a report of sounds of a struggle and a loud argument, and they looked at each other and said, well, yeah, theyd had a discussion that turned into a little bit of an argument, maybe they shouted at each other some, and maybe hed pounded on the kitchen table to make a point, and theyd be careful to keep it down for the rest of the evening, because they certainly didnt want to disturb anybody.

  "Hed been drinking but I wouldnt have said he was drunk, and they were both calm and anxious to please, and I was ready to wish em goodnight and get on to something else. But Vince had been to hundreds of domestics and this one smelled and he could tell. I might have picked up on it myself if I hadnt been so new. Because they were hiding something. Otherwise theyd have said there was no fight and no problem and told us to go to hell.

  "So he stalled, talking about this and that, and Im wondering whats the matter with him, is he waiting for the husband to break out the bottle and offer us drinks. And then we both heard a noise, like a cat but not like a cat. Oh, its nothing, they said, but Mahaffey pushed them out of the way and opened a door, and we found a little girl there, seven years old but small for her age, and now you could see why the domestic disturbance hadnt left any marks on the wife. All of the marks were on the girl.

  "The father had beaten the shit out of her. Bruises all over her, one eye closed, and marks on one arm where they burned her with cigarettes. She fell down, the mother insisted. He never touched her, she fell down.

  "We took them to the station house and parked them in a holding cell. Then we took the kid to a hospital, but first Mahaffey dragged her into an empty office and borrowed somebodys camera. He undressed the kid except for her underpants and took a dozen pictures of her. Im a shit photographer, he said. If I take enough shots maybe somethingll come out.

  "We had to let the parents go. The doctors at the hospital confirmed what we already knew, that the childs injuries could only have been the result of a beating, but the husband was swearing he didnt do it and the wife was backing him up, and you werent going to get testimony out of the kid. And they were very reluctant to prosecute child abuse in those days anyway. Its a little better now. At least I think it is. But we had no choice but to cut the parents loose. "

  "You must have wanted to kill the bastard," Mick said.

  "I wanted to put him away. I couldnt believe that he could do something like that and get away with it. Mahaffey told me it happened all the time. You hardly ever got a case like that to court, not unless the child died and sometimes not then. Then why, I asked, had he bothered taking the pictures? He patted me on the shoulder and told me the pictures were worth a thousand words apiece. I didnt know what he was talking about.

  "Middle of the next week were in the car. Its a nice day, he said. Lets go for a ride, lets go to Manhattan. I didnt know where the hell he was taking me. We wound up on Third Avenue in the Eighties. It was a construction site, theyd knocked down a batch of small buildings and were putting up a big one. I found out where he drinks, Mahaffey said, and we went into this neighborhood tavern, Carneys or Cartys or something, its long gone now. The place was
full of guys with work shoes and hard hats, construction workers on their break or at the end of their shift, having a ball and a beer and unwinding.

  "Well, we were both in uniform, and the conversation stopped when we walked in. The father was at the bar in the middle of a knot of his buddies. Its funny, I dont remember his name. "

  "Why should you? As many years ago as it was. "

  "You would think I would remember. Anyway, Mahaffey walked right through them all and went up to the guy, and he turned to the men standing around and asked them if they knew him. You think hes all right? You think hes a decent sort of a guy? And they all said sure, hes a good man. What else are they going to say?

  "So Mahaffey opens his blouse, his blue shirt, and he takes out a brown envelope, and its got all the pictures he took of the kid. He had them blow them up to eight-by-ten, and they all came out perfect. This is what he did to his own fucking child, Mahaffey says, and he passes the pictures around. Take a good look, this is what the bastard does to a defenseless child. And, when theyve all had a good look, he tells them were cops, we cant put this man in jail, we cant lay a finger on this man. But, he says, they arent cops, and once were out the door we cant stop them from doing whatever they think they have to do. And I know youre good American working men, he tells them, and I know youll do the right thing. "

  "What did they do?"

  "We didnt hang around to watch. Driving back to Brooklyn Mahaffey said, Matt, theres a lesson for you. Never do something when you can get somebody else to do it for you. Because he knew theyd do it, and we found out later that they damn near killed the sonofabitch in the process. Lundy, that was his name. Jim Lundy, or maybe it was John.

  "He wound up in the hospital and he stayed a full week. Wouldnt make a complaint, wouldnt say who did it to him. Swore he fell down and it was his own clumsiness.

  "He couldnt go back to that job when he got out of the hospital because there was no way those men would work with him again. But I guess he stayed in construction and was able to get jobs, because a few years later I heard he went in the hole. Thats what they call it when youre working high steel and you fall off a building, they call it going in the hole. "

  "Did someone push him?"

  "I dont know. He could have been drunk and lost his balance, or he could have done the same thing cold sober, as far as that goes. Or maybe he gave somebody a reason to throw him off the building. I dont know. I dont know what happened to the kid, or to the mother. Probably nothing good, but that would just give them something in common with most of the rest of the world. "

  "And Mahaffey? I suppose hes gone by now. "

  I nodded. "He died in harness. They kept trying to retire him and he kept fighting it, and one day- I wasnt partnered with him by then, I had just made detective on the strength of a terrific collar that was ninety-eight percent luck- anyway, one day he was climbing the stairs of another tenement and his heart cut out on him. He was DOA at Kings County. At his wake everybody said that was the way he would have wanted it, but they got that wrong. I knew what he wanted. What he wanted was to live forever. "