A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

by Lawrence Block

  There were two eight-rounders scheduled before the ten-round main event. The first one didn’t go any distance at all; the fighters were heavyweights, both carrying far too much flab, both given to telegraphing their punches. About a minute into the first round one of them missed with a roundhouse right, spun around full circle, and caught a left hook right on the button. He went down like a felled ox and they had to throw water on him to revive him. The crowd loved it.

  The fighters on the top of the undercard were in the ring waiting for the introduction when I glanced up the aisle toward the entrance. And there was Bergen Stettner.

  He wasn’t wearing the Gestapo coat a few people had described, or the blazer I’d seen him in last week. His jacket was suede, light brown in color, and beneath it he wore a dark brown shirt and a paisley ascot.

  He didn’t have the boy with him.

  I watched as he chatted with another man a few yards from the turnstile. They finished the introductions, rang the opening bell. I went on watching Stettner. After another minute or two he clapped the other man on the shoulder and left the arena.

  I walked out after him, but when I got outside I didn’t see him anywhere. I drifted over to where the FBCS vans were parked and looked around for Richard Thurman, but he wasn’t there to be seen and I didn’t really think he was coming. I stood in the shadows and saw Bergen Stettner come around the side of the building and approach the vans. He talked with someone inside the van for a minute, then returned in the direction he’d come from.

  I waited a few minutes before approaching the van. I stuck my head in the back and said, “Where the hell is Stettner? I can’t find him anywhere.”

  “He was just here,” the man said without turning around. “You just missed him, he was here not five minutes ago.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Say, did he happen to say where Thurman went to?”

  Now he turned. “Oh, right,” he said. “You were looking for him earlier. No, Stettner wanted to know where he was, too. Looks like Thurman’s gonna catch hell.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said.

  I showed my stub and went through the turnstile again. They were in the fourth round now. I didn’t know anything about the fighters, I’d missed the introductions, and I didn’t bother to reclaim my seat. I went over to the refreshment stand and got a Coke in a paper cup and stood in back drinking it. I looked around for Stettner but couldn’t find him. I turned toward the entrance again and saw a woman, and for a second or two I thought she was Chelsea, the placard girl. I looked again and realized I was looking at Olga Stettner.

  She had her long hair pulled back off her face and done up in a sort of bun on the back of her head. I think it’s called a chignon. The style accented her prominent cheekbones and gave her a severe look, but she probably would have looked fairly stern anyway. She was wearing a short jacket of some dark fur and a pair of suede boots that reached to the tops of her calves. I watched as she scanned the room. I didn’t know who she was looking for, her husband or Thurman. She wasn’t looking for me; her eyes passed right over me with no flicker of recognition.

  I wonder how I’d have reacted to her if I hadn’t known who she was. She was an attractive woman, certainly, but there was something about her, some magnetism, that may have owed a lot to what I already knew about her. And I knew too goddamned much about her. What I knew made it impossible to look at her, and impossible not to.

  BY the end of the fight they were both standing there, Bergen and Olga, looking out over the big room as if they owned it. The ring announcer gave the decision and each fighter in turn, along with a three- or four-man retinue, made his way from the ring to the stairwell off to the left of the entrance doors. After they’d dropped from sight two other fighters emerged via the same set of basement stairs, fresh where the outgoing fighters had been spent, making their way in turn down the main aisle to the ring. They were middleweights and they had both had a good number of fights in the area. I knew them from the Garden. They were both black, both had won almost all of their bouts, and the shorter and darker of the two had knockout power in either hand. The other kid wasn’t as strong a puncher but he was very quick and had a reach advantage. It figured to be a very good matchup.

  Like the previous week, they introduced a handful of boxing figures, including both scheduled participants in next week’s main bout. A politician, the deputy borough president of Queens, got introduced and received a chorus of boos, which in turn sparked some laughter. Then they cleared the ring and introduced the fighters, and I glanced over at the Stettners and saw them making their way toward the stairs.

  I gave them a minute’s head start. Then they rang the bell for the start of the fight and I walked down the stairs to the basement.

  At the foot of the stairs was a broad hallway with walls on either side of unfinished concrete block. The first door I came to was open, and inside I could see the winner of the previous bout. He had a pint bottle of Smirnoff in his hand and he was pouring drinks for his friends and taking quick nips from the bottle for himself.

  I walked a little further and listened at a closed door, tried the knob. It was locked. The next door was open but the light was out and the room empty. It had the same interior walls as the hallway, the same floor of black and white tiles. I walked on, and a male voice called, “Hey!”

  I turned around. It was Stettner, with his wife a few steps behind him. He was fifteen or twenty yards behind me and he walked slowly toward me, a slight smile on his lips. “Can I help you?” he asked. “Are you looking for something?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The men’s room. Where the hell is it?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Then why did that clown send me down here?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but this is a private area down here. Go upstairs, the men’s room is right next door to the refreshment stand.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “I know where that is.”

  I moved past him and mounted the stairs. I could feel his eyes on my back all the way to the top.

  I went back to my seat and tried to watch the fight. They were mixing it up and the crowd loved it but after two rounds I realized I wasn’t paying any attention. I got up and left.

  Outside, the air was colder and a wind had blown up. I walked a block and tried to get my bearings. I didn’t know the neighborhood and there was no one to ask. I wanted a taxi or a telephone and had no idea where to find either.

  I wound up flagging down a gypsy cab on Grand Avenue. He didn’t have a meter or a city medallion and wasn’t supposed to pick up fares on the street, but once you get outside of Manhattan nobody pays too much attention to that rule. He wanted a flat twenty dollars to take me anywhere in Manhattan. We settled on fifteen and I gave him Thurman’s address, then changed my mind at the thought of spending another hour in a doorway. I told him to take me to my hotel.

  The cab was a wreck, with exhaust fumes coming up through the floorboards. I cranked down both rear windows as far as they would go. The driver had the radio tuned to a broadcast of polka music, with a disc jockey who chattered away gaily in what I took to be Polish. We got onto Metropolitan Avenue and went over the Williamsburg Bridge to the Lower East Side, which struck me as the long way around, but I kept my mouth shut. There was no meter ticking away so it wasn’t costing me extra, and for all I knew his way was shorter.

  The only message waiting for me was from Joe Durkin. He’d left his home phone number. I went upstairs and tried Thurman first and hung up when the machine answered. I called Joe and his wife answered and called him to the phone, and when he came on the line I said, “He didn’t show in Maspeth but Stettner did. Both Stettners. They were looking for him the same as I was, so I guess I wasn’t the only person who got stood up tonight. Nobody on the TV crew had a clue where he went to. I think he flew the coop.”

  “He tried. His wings fell off.”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s a restaurant downstairs.
I forget the name, it means radish in Italian.”

  “Radicchio’s not radish. It’s a kind of lettuce.”

  “Well, whatever it is. Six-thirty or so, you must of just got on your way to Maspeth, guy goes out back with a load of kitchen garbage. Way in the back behind two of the cans there’s a body. Guess who.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I’m afraid so. No question about the ID. He went out a fifth-floor window so he’s not as pretty as he used to be, but there’s enough of his face left so you know right away who you’re looking at. Are you sure it doesn’t mean radish? It was Antonelli told me. You’d think he’d know, wouldn’t you?”

  Chapter 18

  The papers loved it. Richard Thurman had fallen to his death just a matter of yards from where his wife had been brutally raped and murdered less than three months previously. One potential Pulitzer Prize winner theorized that his last sight in this life might have been a glimpse of the Gottschalk apartment as he sailed past its window on the way down. That seemed unlikely, since you generally draw the blinds when you leave town for six months and a day, but I didn’t have strong enough feelings on the subject to write a letter to the editor.

  Nobody was questioning the suicide, although opinion seemed to be divided on the motive. Either he was despondent over the loss of his wife and unborn child or he was guilt-ridden over having caused their deaths. An editorial page columnist in the News saw the case as epitomizing the failure of the greed of the eighties. “You used to hear a lot of talk about Having It All,” he wrote. “Well, three months ago Richard Thurman had it all—money in the bank, a great apartment, a beautiful wife, a glamorous job in the booming cable TV industry, and a baby on the way. In no time at all it turned to ashes, and the job and the money weren’t enough to fill the void in Richard Thurman’s heart. You may think he was a villain, that he engineered the unholy scenario enacted in November at that house on West Fifty-second Street. Or you may see him as a victim. Either way, he turned out to be a man who had had it all—and who had nothing left to cling to when he lost it.”

  “YOUR instincts were on target,” Durkin told me. “You were afraid something happened to him and you wanted to get into the apartment. Same time, you didn’t really think he was in there. Well, he wasn’t. The ME’s guess on time of death is seven to nine A.M., which would figure, because from ten in the morning you had kitchen staff in the joint downstairs and they probably would have heard the impact when he landed. Why nobody noticed the body during lunch hour is hard to figure, except that it was way over at one end of the courtyard and their service door was at the other end, and nobody got close enough to notice anything. You got your arms full of leftover eggplant, I guess you just want to dump it and get back inside, especially on a cold day.”

  It was Friday morning now and we were in Thurman’s apartment. The lab crew had been all through the place the previous evening, while I was chasing shadows in Maspeth. I walked around the place, moving from room to room, not knowing what I was looking for. Maybe not looking for anything at all.

  “Nice place,” Joe said. “Modern furniture, looks stylish but a person could live with it. Everything overstuffed, built for comfort. You usually hear them say that about a woman, don’t you? ‘Built for comfort, not for speed.’ Where does speed come into it, do you happen to know?”

  “I think they once said it about horses.”

  “Yeah? Makes sense. Assuming you get a more comfortable ride on a fat horse. I’ll have to ask one of the guys in TPF. When I was a kid, first wanted to be a cop, that’s what I wanted to do, you know. I’d see the cops on horseback and that’s what I wanted to be. Of course I got over it by the time I got to the Academy. Still, you know, it’s not a bad life.”

  “If you like horses.”

  “Well, sure. If you didn’t like ’em in the first place—”

  “Thurman didn’t kill himself,” I said.

  “Hard to be sure of that. Guy spills his guts, comes home, wakes up early, realizes what he’s done. Sees he’s got no way out, which he didn’t, because you were gonna bag him for doing his wife. Maybe his conscience starts working for real. Maybe he just happens to realize he’s looking at some real time upstate, and he knows what it’s gonna be like in the joint, a pretty boy like him. Out the window and your troubles are over.”

  “He wasn’t the type. And he wasn’t afraid of the law, he was afraid of Stettner.”

  “Only his prints on the window, Matt.”

  “Stettner wore gloves when he did Amanda. He could put them on again to throw Richard out the window. Thurman lived here, his prints would already be there. Or Stettner gets him to open the window. ‘Richard, it’s roasting in here, could we have a little air?’ ”

  “He left a note.”

  “Typewritten, you said.”

  “Yeah, I know, but some bona fide suicides type their notes. It was pretty much your generic suicide note. ‘God forgive me, I can’t take it anymore.’ Didn’t say he did it, didn’t say he didn’t.”

  “That’s because Stettner wouldn’t have known how much we already knew.”

  “Or because Thurman wasn’t taking any chances. Suppose he falls four stories and lives? He’s in the hospital with twenty bones broken, last thing he wants is to face murder charges on the basis of his fucking suicide note.” He put out a cigarette in a souvenir ashtray. “It so happens I agree with you,” he said. “I think the odds are he had help going out the window. That’s one reason I had the lab boys do a real thorough job last night and it’s why we’re looking for a witness who saw anybody going in or out of here yesterday morning. It’d be nice to turn one up, and it’d be nice if you could put Stettner at the scene, but I can tell you now it ain’t gonna happen. And even if it did there’s no case against him. So he was here, so what? Thurman was alive when he left. He was despondent, he seemed upset, but who ever thought the poor man would take his own life? Horseshit on the half shell, but let’s see you go and prove it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Besides,” he said, “is it so bad this way? We know Thurman killed his wife and we know he didn’t get away with it. True, he had help, and maybe it was Stettner—”

  “Of course it was Stettner.”

  “What of course? All we got for that is Thurman’s word, which he said to you in a private unrecorded conversation a few hours before he fell to his death. Maybe he was jerking you around, did you stop to think of that?”

  “I know he was jerking me around, Joe. He was trying to make himself look as good as possible and trying to make Stettner look like a combination of Svengali and Jack the Ripper. So what?”

  “So maybe it wasn’t Stettner. Maybe Thurman had some other accomplices, maybe he had some business reason to do a number on Stettner. Look, I’m not saying that’s what happened. I know it’s farfetched. The whole fucking case is farfetched. What I’m saying is that Thurman set up his wife’s killing and he’s dead now, and if every murder case I ever had worked out this well I wouldn’t sit around eating my heart out, you know what I mean? If Stettner did it and he skates, well, I live with worse than that every day of my life. If he was as bad as Thurman made him out to be he would have got his dick in the wringer somewhere along the line, and it never once happened. Man’s never been arrested, hasn’t got a sheet on him anywhere. Far as I can tell he never even got a speeding ticket.”

  “You checked around.”

  “Of course I checked around, for Christ’s sake. What do you expect me to do? If he’s a bad guy I’d love to put him away. But he doesn’t look so bad, not on the record.”

  “He’s another Albert Schweitzer.”

  “No,” he said, “he’s probably a real prick, I’ll grant you that. But that’s not a crime.”

  I called Lyman Warriner in Cambridge. I didn’t have to break the news to him. Some sharp-witted reporter had done that for me, calling Amanda’s brother for his reaction. “Of course I declined to comment,” he said. “I didn’t eve
n know if it was true. He killed himself?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “I see. That’s not quite the same thing as yes, is it?”

  “There’s a possibility that he was murdered by an accomplice. The police are pursuing that possibility, but they don’t expect to get anywhere. At the present time there’s no evidence that contradicts a verdict of suicide.”

  “But you don’t believe that’s what happened.”

  “I don’t, but what I believe’s not terribly important. I spent a couple of hours with Thurman last night and I got what you were hoping I’d get. He admitted murdering your sister.”

  “He actually admitted it.”

  “Yes, he did. He tried to make his accomplice the heavy, but he admitted his own role in what happened.” I decided to stretch a point. “He said she was unconscious for virtually all of it, Lyman. She got a blow on the head early on and never knew what happened to her.”

  “I’d like to believe that.”

  “I was scheduled to meet with him yesterday afternoon,” I went on. “I was hoping to talk him into a full confession, but failing that I was prepared to record our conversation and turn it over to the police. But before I could do that—”

  “He killed himself. Well, I’ll say one thing. I’m certainly glad I hired you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Wouldn’t you say your investigation precipitated his actions?”

  I thought about it. “I guess you could say that,” I said.

  “And I’m just as glad it ended as it did. It’s quicker and cleaner than suffering through a court trial, and a lot of the time they walk away, don’t they? Even when everybody knows they’re guilty.”

  “It happens.”

  “And even when it doesn’t the sentences are never long enough, or they behave themselves, they’re model prisoners and after four or five years they’re out on parole. No, I’m more than satisfied, Matthew. Do I owe you any money?”