“I think so.”
“And Lee Marvin’s dead, of course. Lee Marvin and John Cassavetes and Robert Ryan and Robert Webber. Who else?”
“I don’t know.”
She was standing in front of me now, glaring down at me. “Everybody’s dead,” she said angrily. “Have you noticed that? People keep dying left and right. Even the fucking ayatollah died, and I thought that raghead sonofabitch was going to live forever. They killed that boy, didn’t they?”
“That’s what it looked like.”
“That’s what it was. They tortured him and fucked him and tortured him some more and fucked him some more, and then they killed him. That’s what we just saw.”
“Yes.”
“I’m all mixed up,” she said. She went over and threw herself down on the chair. “The Dirty Dozen, people get killed left and right, all those Germans and some of our guys, and so what? You see it and it’s nothing. But this other thing, those two creeps and that kid—”
“It was real.”
“How could anybody do anything like that? I wasn’t born yesterday, I’m not particularly naive. At least I don’t think I am. Am I?”
“I never thought so.”
“I’m a woman of the world, for Christ’s sake. I mean, let’s come right out and say it, I’m a whore.”
“Elaine—”
“No, let me finish, baby. I’m not debasing myself, I’m only stating a fact. I happen to be in a profession where you don’t necessarily see people at their best. I know the world is full of weirdos and nut jobs. I’m aware of that. I know people are kinky, I know they like to play dress-up and wear leather and rubber and fur and tie each other up and play mind-fuck games and all the rest of it. And I know there are people who lose it and go off the chart and do terrible things. I almost got killed by one of them, do you remember?”
“Vividly.”
“Me too. Well, okay. Fine. Welcome to the world. There are days when I think somebody ought to pull the plug on the whole human race, but okay, in the meantime I can live with it. But I just can’t get my mind around this shit, I really can’t.”
“I know.”
“I feel dirty,” she said. “I need a shower.”
Chapter 6
I would have called Will first thing the next morning but I didn’t know how to get hold of him. I knew deeply personal things about him, I knew he started drinking cough syrup at twelve, I knew his fiancé had broken up with him because he’d gotten into a drunken argument with her father, I knew his current marriage had hit a rocky stretch when he sobered up. But I didn’t know the guy’s last name or where he worked, so I had to wait until the eight-thirty meeting.
He got to St. Paul’s just after the meeting started, and on the break he made a beeline for me and wanted to know if I’d had a chance to see the film. “Sure,” I said, “it’s always been one of my favorites. I especially liked the part where Donald Sutherland impersonates a general and reviews the troops.”
“Jesus,” he said, “I specifically wanted you to watch that particular film, the cassette I gave you last night. Didn’t I tell you?”
“Just a little joke,” I said.
“Oh.”
“I saw the thing. It wasn’t my idea of a good time, but I saw it all the way through.”
“And?”
“And what?”
I decided we could get along without the second half of the meeting. I took his arm and led him outside and up a flight of stairs to street level. Across Ninth Avenue a man and woman were arguing about money, their voices carrying far and wide on the warm air. I asked Will where the cassette had come from.
“You saw the label,” he said. “The video-rental place around the corner from me. Sixty-first and Broadway.”
“You rented it?”
“That’s right. I’ve seen it before, Mimi and I have both seen it several times, but we caught one of the sequels on cable last week and we wanted to look at the real thing again. And you know what we saw.”
“Right.”
“A fucking snuff film. That’s what they’re called, isn’t it?”
“I think so.”
“I never saw one before.”
“Neither did I.”
“Really? I thought being a cop and a detective and all—”
“Never.”
He sighed. “Well, what do we do now?”
“What do you mean, Will?”
“Do we go to the cops? I don’t want to get in trouble but I wouldn’t feel right just looking the other way, either. I guess what I’m saying is I want your advice on how to proceed.”
They were still yelling at each other on the far side of the avenue. Leave me alone, the man kept saying. Leave me the fuck alone.
I said, “Let me get a clear picture of how you wound up with the film. You walked into the store, you picked it off the shelf—”
“You don’t pick the actual cassette off the shelf.”
“You don’t?”
He explained the procedure, how they had a cardboard sleeve that they displayed, and you took that to the counter and exchanged it for the cassette that went with it. He had a membership there, so they checked the film out to him and collected the charge for an overnight rental, whatever it was. A couple of dollars.
“And this was at Broadway and Sixty-first?”
He nodded. “Two, three doors from the corner. Right next to Martin’s Bar.” I knew the bar, a big open room like a Blarney Stone, with low-priced drinks and hot food on a steam table. Years ago they’d had a sign in the window touting their Happy Hour, with drinks at half price from 8 to 10 A.M. That’s got to be some Happy Hour at eight in the morning.
“How late are they open?”
“Eleven, I think. Midnight on weekends.”
“I’ll go talk to them,” I said.
“Now?”
“Why not?”
“Well, I don’t know. Do you want me to come with you?”
“There’s no need.”
“You’re sure? Because in that case I think I’ll go back for the rest of the meeting.”
“You might as well.”
He turned away, then back again. “Oh, Matt? I was supposed to bring the film back yesterday, so they may want to charge for an extra day. Whatever it comes to, just let me know and I’ll reimburse you.”
I told him that wasn’t something he had to worry about.
THE video-rental store was where Will had told me it would be. I stopped at my room first and had the cassette with me when I walked in. There were four or five customers browsing, a man and a woman behind the counter. They were both in their thirties, and he had a two- or three-day growth of beard. I figured he was the manager. If she was in charge, she probably would have told him to go home and shave.
I walked over to him and said I wanted to speak to the manager. “I’m the owner,” he said. “Will that do?”
I showed him the cassette. “I believe you rented this,” I said.
“That’s our label, so it must be one of ours. The Dirty Dozen, always a popular favorite. Something wrong with it? And are you sure it’s the tape or has it been a while since you cleaned your heads?”
“A customer of yours checked this out two days ago.”
“And you’re returning it for him? If it was two days there’ll be a late charge. Let me look it up.” He went over to a computer terminal and keyed in a code number from the label. “William Haberman,” he said. “According to this it was three days ago, not two, so that means he owes us four dollars and ninety cents.”
I didn’t reach for my wallet. I said, “Are you familiar with this particular tape? Not the film itself but the individual cassette?”
“Should I be?”
“There’s another film recorded over half of it.”
“Let me see that,” he said. He took the cassette from me and pointed at one edge. “See right there? Your blank cassette has a tab there. You record something you want to save, you br
eak the tab off and you can’t record over it by mistake. A commercial cassette like this comes with a gap where the tab would be so you can’t ruin it by accidentally hitting the Record button, which people would do all the time otherwise, geniuses that they are. But if you bridge the gap with a piece of Scotch tape, then you’re back in business. You sure that’s not what your friend did?”
“I’m very sure.”
He looked suspicious for a moment, then shrugged. “So he wants another copy of Dozen, right? No problem, it’s a popular title, we’ve got multiple copies. Not an even dozen, dirty or otherwise, but enough.” He was on his way to get one when I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“That’s not the problem,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Someone recorded a pornographic movie over the middle section of The Dirty Dozen,” I said. “Not just the usual X-rated romp but an extremely violent and sadistic specimen of kiddie porn.”
“You’re kidding.”
I shook my head. “I’d like to know how it got there,” I said.
“Jesus, I’ll bet you would,” he said. He reached to touch the cassette, drew his hand away as if it were hot. “I swear I had nothing to do with it. We don’t carry any X-rated stuff, no Deep Throat, no Devil in Miss Jones, none of that garbage. Most rental shops have a section or at least a few titles, you get married couples who want some visual foreplay, they’re not the type to patronize the cesspools on Times Square. But when I opened up I decided I didn’t want to have anything to do with that kind of material. I don’t want it in my store.” He looked down at the cassette but made no move to touch it. “So how did it get here? That’s the big question, isn’t it?”
“Someone probably wanted to make a copy of another tape.”
“And he didn’t have a blank cassette handy so he used this one instead. But why use a rental tape and then turn it in the next day? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe someone made a mistake,” I suggested. “Who was the last person to rent it?”
“Before Haberman, you mean. Let’s see.” He consulted the computer, frowned. “He was the first,” he said.
“It was a brand-new tape?”
“No, of course not. Does it look like a new tape? I don’t know, you get everything on computer and you can keep records like never before, and then it does something like this. Oh, wait a minute. I know where this tape came from.”
A woman, he explained, had brought in a whole shopping bag full of videocassettes, most of them good solid classics. “There were all three versions of The Maltese Falcon, if you can believe that. One from 1936 called Satan Met a Lady, with Bette Davis and Warren Williams. Arthur Treacher plays Joel Cairo, and the Sidney Greenstreet role is played by a fat lady named Alison Skipworth, believe it or not. And then there’s the original 1931 version, with Ricardo Cortez playing Spade as a real slimeball, nothing like the hero Bogart made him into in 1940. That was called The Maltese Falcon, but after they released the Huston version the first one was retitled. Dangerous Female, they called it.”
The woman had said she was a landlady. A tenant of hers had died and she was selling off some of his things to recoup the back rent he owed.
“So I bought the lot,” he said. “I don’t know if he really owed back rent or she just saw a chance to pick up a couple of dollars, but I knew she wasn’t a burglar, she hadn’t gone and stolen the tapes. And they were in good condition, the ones I looked at.” A rueful smile. “I didn’t look at all of them. I certainly didn’t look at this one.”
“That would explain it,” I said. “If he owned the tape, whoever he was—”
“And he had a tape to copy, and maybe it was the middle of the night so he couldn’t go out and buy a blank cassette. Sure, that makes sense. He wouldn’t record on a rental cassette, but this one didn’t become a rental cassette until I bought it from her, and by then he had already dubbed something else onto it.” He looked at me. “Really kiddie porn? You weren’t exaggerating?”
I said I wasn’t. He said something about the kind of world it was, and I asked the woman’s name.
“No way I’d remember it,” he said, “assuming I ever knew it in the first place, which I don’t think I did.”
“Didn’t you write her a check?”
“Probably not. I think she wanted cash. People generally do. There’s a chance I wrote out a check. Do you want me to see?”
“I’d appreciate it.”
He took time out to wait on a customer, then went into a back room and emerged a few minutes later. “No check,” he said. “I didn’t think there would be. I found my memo of the transaction, which is amazing enough. She had thirty-one cassettes and I gave her seventy-five dollars. That sounds low, but these were used items, and it’s the overhead that’s everything in this business.”
“Did you have her name on the transaction memo?”
“No. The date’s June fourth, if that’s any help. And I’ve never seen the woman before or since. I gather she lives in the neighborhood, but I don’t know anything more about her than that.”
He couldn’t come up with anything else, and I couldn’t think of any more questions to ask him. He said that Will had a one-night rental of The Dirty Dozen coming, an unimpaired copy, and at no charge.
When I got back to my hotel I looked up Will’s number—it was easy now that I knew his last name. I called him and told him he could pick up his free movie whenever he wanted.
“As far as the other movie goes,” I said, “there’s nothing for either of us to do. Some guy copied a tape onto his own cassette of The Dirty Dozen and it wound up finding its way into circulation. The man whose tape it was is dead and there’s no way of finding out who he was, let alone tracing the tape back from him. Anyway, items like that get passed around and around like that, with people interested in that sort of thing copying each other’s tapes because that’s the only way to get the stuff, it’s not available on the open market.”
“Thank God for that,” he said. “But is it all right to just forget about it? A boy was killed.”
“The original tape could be ten years old,” I said. “It could have been shot in Brazil.” Not likely, not with everybody speaking American English, but he let it pass. “It’s a pretty horrible piece of tape, and my life would be every bit as rich and fulfilling if I’d never seen it, but I don’t see that there’s anything to be done about it. There are probably hundreds of similar tapes around the city. Dozens, anyway. The only thing special about this one is that you and I happened to see it.”
“There’s no point in taking it to the police?”
“None that I can see. They’d confiscate it, but then what? It would just go in a storeroom somewhere, and meanwhile you’d have to answer a lot of questions about how it happened to wind up in your hands.”
“I don’t want that.”
“Of course not.”
“Well,” he said. “Then I guess we just forget about it.”
EXCEPT that I couldn’t.
What I had seen and the manner in which I had seen it made a fairly deep impression on me. I had been speaking the truth when I told Will I had never seen a snuff film. I heard rumors from time to time—that they’d confiscated one in Chinatown, for instance, and they’d set up a projector at the Fifth Precinct and screened it. The cop I heard it from said the cop who’d told him had left the room when the girl in the film had her hand cut off, and maybe it happened just that way, but cops’ stories get improved with the telling the same as saloon stories about Paddy Farrelly’s head. I knew there were films like that, and I knew there were people who would make them and others who would watch them, but the world they lived in had never before impinged upon my own.
And so there were things that stayed with me, and they were not what I might have expected. The boy’s laconic air when the filming began—“Is that thing running? Am I supposed to say anything?” His surprise when the party got nasty, and his inability to believe what was happening.<
br />
The man’s hand on the boy’s forehead in the midst of it all, gentle, solicitous, smoothing the hair back. It was a gesture repeated intermittently through the proceedings, until the final cruelty was inflicted and the camera panned to a drain set in the floor a few yards from the boy’s feet. We had seen the drain before but now the camera made a special point of seeking it out, a black metal grid set in a black-and-white checkerboard floor. Blood, red as the female performer’s lipstick, red as her long fingernails and the tips of her little breasts, flowed across the squares of black and white, flowed into the drain.
That was the final shot, no people in it, just the floor tiles and the drain and the blood flowing. Then a white screen, and then Lee Marvin again, making the world safe for democracy.
For a few days, maybe as much as a week, I found myself thinking about what I had seen. I didn’t do anything about it, though, because I couldn’t think what to do. I had stashed the cassette in my safe-deposit box without looking at it a second time—once was enough—and, while it seemed like something I ought to hang on to, what was there to do with it? What it was, really, was a videotape in which two unidentifiable persons had sexual relations with one another and with a third person, also unidentified, whom they mistreated, presumably against his will, and almost certainly killed. There was no way to tell who they were or where and when they did what they did.
One day after a noon meeting I walked down Broadway to Forty-second Street, where I spent a couple of hours on the nasty stretch between Broadway and Eighth. I walked in and out of a lot of porno shops. I was self-conscious at first, but I got over it, and I took my time and browsed in the S-and-M sections. Each shop had some—bondage, discipline, torture, pain, each with a few sentences of description and a still photo on the outside to whet your appetite.
I didn’t expect to see our version of The Dirty Dozen offered commercially. Censorship in the Times Square shops is minimal, but kiddie porn and murder are still prohibited, and what I’d seen was both of those. The boy might have been old enough to pass, and a good editor could conceivably have trimmed the worst of the violence, but it still seemed unlikely that I’d run across a soft version offered for sale.
A Dance at the Slaughterhouse Page 7