A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

by Lawrence Block

  “I know,” I said. “When I was at the Academy they taught us that rape was a crime of anger toward women, that it wasn’t sexual at all. But over the years I stopped believing that. Half the time nowadays it seems to be a crime of opportunity, a way to have sex without taking her to dinner first. You’re committing a robbery or a burglary, there’s a woman there, she looks good to you, so why not?”

  He nodded. “Another time,” he said. “Like last night, but over the river in Jersey. Dope dealers in a fine house out in the country, and we were going to have to kill everybody in the house. We knew that before we went in.” He drank whiskey and sighed. “I’ll go to hell for sure. Oh, they were killers themselves, but that’s no excuse, is it?”

  “Maybe it is,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s not.” He put the glass down and wrapped his hand around the bottle but didn’t lift it from the table. “I’d just shot the man,” he said, “and one of the lads was searching for more cash, and I heard cries coming from another room. So I went in there, and there’s one of the boys on top of the woman, with her skirt up and her clothes ripped, and she’s fighting him and crying out.”

  “ ‘Get off her,’ I told him, and he looked at me like I was mad. She was choice, he said, and we were going to kill her anyway, so why shouldn’t he have her before she was no use to anybody?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I kicked him,” he said. “I kicked him hard enough to break three ribs, and then before I did anything else I shot her between the eyes, because she shouldn’t have to put up with more of it. And then I picked him up and threw him against the wall, and when he came stumbling off it I hit him in the face. I wanted to kill him, but there were people who knew he’d worked for me and it would be like leaving a calling card behind. I took him away from there and paid him his share and got a closemouthed doctor to bandage his ribs, and then I packed him off. He was from Philadelphia, and I told him to go back there, that he was finished in New York. I’m sure he doesn’t know to this day what he did that was wrong. She was going to die anyway, so why not have the use of her first? And why not roast her liver and eat it, why let the flesh go to waste?”

  “There’s a pretty thought.”

  “In the name of Jesus,” he said, “we’re all going to die, aren’t we? So why not do any bloody thing we please with each other? Is that it? Is that how the world works?”

  “I don’t know how the world works.”

  “No, and neither do I. And I don’t know how you get through it on fucking coffee, I swear I don’t. If I didn’t 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 there’s some who are all right,” he said. “I’ll grant you that. What was the name of that fellow we met at the fights?”

  “Chance.”

  “I liked him,” he said, “but you’d have to say he’s another type entirely from the usual run. He’s educated, he’s a gentleman, he’s a professional man.”

  “Do you know how I got to know him?”

  “At his place of business, I would suppose. Or didn’t you say you met him at the fights?”

  “That’s 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.”

  “He’s a pimp, then.”

  “Not anymore. Now he’s an art dealer.”

  “And a friend of yours.”

  “And a friend of mine.”

  “You have an odd taste in friends. What’s 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, isn’t 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, there’s priests that have their share of both. He tried one thing and another and two years ago he was in Oregon selling Plymouths. ‘It’s great here, Mickey, come out and see me.’ But I never did, and he’s likely gone somewhere else by now. I think the poor bastard still wishes he was a priest, even though his faith’s long since lost. Can you understand that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Were you raised Catholic? You weren’t, 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 wouldn’t 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 he’d 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, he’d go back the next night and do it right. And he’d include an extra for goodwill, he offered. He’d burn the man’s house down and not charge him for it.

  I told a story I hadn’t 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 didn’t 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. It’s 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 we’re standing in front of the door and you can’t hear a thing. ‘Ah, shit,’ Vince said. ‘What do you bet he killed her? Now he’ll be crying and yanking his hair out and we’ll 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 who’d been pretty in high school and let herself go. And they were surprised to hear that we’d had a complaint. Oh, had they been making too much noise? Well, maybe they’d been playing the TV a little loud. It wasn’t even on now, the whole place was silent as a grave. Mahaffey pushed it the least little bit, said we’d had a report of sounds of a struggle and a loud argument, and they looked at each other and said, well, yeah, they’d had a discussion that turned into a little bit of an argument, maybe they shouted at each other some, and maybe he’d pounded on the kitchen table to make a point, and they’d be careful to keep it down for the rest of the evening, because they certainly didn’t want to disturb anybody.

  “He’d been drinking but I wouldn’t 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 hadn’t been so new. Because they were hiding so
mething. Otherwise they’d 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 I’m wondering what’s 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, it’s 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 hadn’t 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 somebody’s camera. He undressed the kid except for her underpants and took a dozen pictures of her. ‘I’m a shit photographer,’ he said. ‘If I take enough shots maybe something’ll come out.’

  “We had to let the parents go. The doctors at the hospital confirmed what we already knew, that the child’s injuries could only have been the result of a beating, but the husband was swearing he didn’t do it and the wife was backing him up, and you weren’t going to get testimony out of the kid. And they were very reluctant to prosecute child abuse in those days anyway. It’s 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 couldn’t 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 didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Middle of the next week we’re in the car. ‘It’s a nice day,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a ride, let’s go to Manhattan.’ I didn’t know where the hell he was taking me. We wound up on Third Avenue in the Eighties. It was a construction site, they’d 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, Carney’s or Carty’s or something, it’s 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. It’s funny, I don’t 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 he’s all right? You think he’s a decent sort of a guy?’ And they all said sure, he’s 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 it’s 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 they’ve all had a good look, he tells them we’re cops, we can’t put this man in jail, we can’t lay a finger on this man. But, he says, they aren’t cops, and once we’re out the door we can’t stop them from doing whatever they think they have to do. ‘And I know you’re good American working men,’ he tells them, ‘and I know you’ll do the right thing.’ ”

  “What did they do?”

  “We didn’t hang around to watch. Driving back to Brooklyn Mahaffey said, ‘Matt, there’s a lesson for you. Never do something when you can get somebody else to do it for you.’ Because he knew they’d 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. Wouldn’t make a complaint, wouldn’t say who did it to him. Swore he fell down and it was his own clumsiness.

  “He couldn’t 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. That’s what they call it when you’re working high steel and you fall off a building, they call it going in the hole.”

  “Did someone push him?”

  “I don’t 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 don’t know. I don’t 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 he’s gone by now.”

  I nodded. “He died in harness. They kept trying to retire him and he kept fighting it, and one day—I wasn’t 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.”

  NOT long before dawn he said, “Matt, would you say that I’m an alcoholic?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said. “How many years did it take me to say I was one myself? I’m not in a hurry to take anybody else’s inventory.”

  I got up and went to the men’s room, and when I came back he said, “God knows I like the drink. It’d be a bad bastard of a world without it.”

  “It’s that kind of world either way.”

  “Ah, but sometimes this stuff lets you lose sight of it for a while. Or at least it softens the focus.” He lifted his glass, gazed into it. “They say you can’t stare at an eclipse of the sun with your naked eye. You have to look through a piece of smoked glass to save your vision. Isn’t it as dangerous to see life straight on? And don’t you need this smoky stuff to make it safe to look at?”

  “That’s a good way to put it.”

  “Well, bullshit and poetry, that’s the Irish stock in trade. But let me tell you something. Do you know what’s the best thing about drinking?”

  “Nights like this.”

  “Nights like this, but it’s not just the booze makes nights like this. It’s one of us drinking and one of us not, and something else I couldn’t lay my finger on.” He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “No,” he said, “the best thing about drinking is a certain kind of moment that only happens once in a while. I don’t know that it happens for everyone, either.

  “It happens for me on nights when I’m sitting up alone with a glass and a bottle. I’ll be drunk but not too drunk, you know, and I’ll be looking off into the distance, thinking but not thinking—do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’ll be a moment when it all comes clear, a moment when I can just about see the whole of it. My mind reaches out and wraps itself around all of creation, and I’m this close to having hold of it. And then”—he snapped his fingers—“it’s gone. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you drank, did you—”

  “Yes,” I said. “Once in a while. But do you want to know something? I’ve had the same thing happen sober.”

  “Have you now!”

  “Yes. Not often, and not at
all the first two years or so. But every now and then I’ll be sitting in my hotel room with a book, reading a few pages and then looking out the window and thinking about what I’ve just read, or of something else, or of nothing at all.”

  “Ah.”

  “And then I’ll have that experience just about as you described it. It’s a kind of knowing, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “But knowing what? I can’t explain it. I always took it for granted it was the booze that allowed it to happen, but then it happened sober and I realized it couldn’t be that.”

  “Now you’ve given me something to think about. I never thought for a moment it could happen sober.”

  “It can, though. And it’s just as you described it. But I’ll tell you something, Mick. When it happens to you sober, and you’re seeing it without that piece of smoked glass—”

  “Ah.”

  “—and you have it, you just about have it, and then it’s gone.” I looked into his eyes. “It can break your heart.”

  “It will do that,” he said. “Drunk or sober, it will break your heart.”

  IT was light out when he looked at his watch and got to his feet. He went into his office and came back wearing his butcher’s apron. It was white cotton, frayed here and there from years of laundering, and it covered him from the neck to below the knees. Bloodstains the color of rust patterned it like an abstract canvas. Some had faded almost to invisibility. Others looked fresh.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s time.”

  We hadn’t discussed it once throughout the long night but I knew where we were going and had no objections. We walked to the garage where he kept his car and rode down Ninth Avenue to Fourteenth Street. We turned left, and partway down the block he left the big car in a no-parking zone in front of a funeral parlor. The proprietor, Twomey, knew him and knew the car. It wouldn’t be towed or ticketed.

  St. Bernard’s stood just east of Twomey’s. I followed Mick up the steps and down the left-hand aisle. There is a seven o’clock mass weekdays in the main sanctuary, which he had missed, but there is a smaller mass an hour later in a small chamber to the left of the altar, generally attended by a handful of nuns and various others who stopped in on their way to work. Mick’s father had done so virtually every day, and there were always butchers in attendance, though I don’t know if anyone else called it the butchers’ mass.