A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

by Lawrence Block

  “Yes.”

  “Because if I keep faith with you—”

  “I get the point,” I said. “I knew someone in a similar situation once. Give me a minute, I want to see if I can remember how he handled it.” I thought for a moment. “All right,” I said. “See how this sounds to you. I’ll instruct both parties that, if I should die a year or more after today’s date, they are to destroy the material left with them unless special circumstances exist.”

  “What sort of special circumstances?”

  “If there’s a strong suspicion that I’ve died as a result of foul play, and if the murderer has not been either identified or apprehended. In other words, you’re clear if I’m run over by a bus, or shot by a jealous lover. If I’m murdered by person or persons unknown, then you’re in the soup.”

  “And if you die within the first year?”

  “You’ve got a problem.”

  “Even if it’s a bus?”

  “Even if it’s a heart attack.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “I don’t like that much.”

  “Best I can do.”

  “Shit. How’s your health?”

  “Not bad.”

  “I hope you don’t do a lot of coke.”

  “I can’t drink too much of it because of the bubbles.”

  “That’s funny. You don’t do skydiving or hang gliding, do you? Don’t fly your own plane? God, will you listen to this? It sounds like an insurance examination. Well, you take good care of yourself, Scudder.”

  “I’ll stay out of drafts.”

  “You do that,” he said. “You know, I think Olga’s right, I think I’m going to enjoy you. What are you doing tonight?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight. Why don’t you join us for dinner? We’ll drink some champagne, have a few laughs. Tomorrow’s for business but there’s no reason we can’t be social tonight.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have plans made.”

  “Cancel them! What’s so important you can’t reschedule it, eh?”

  “I have to go to an AA meeting.”

  He laughed long and hard. “Oh, that’s marvelous,” he said. “Yes, now that you mention it, we all have plans. Olga’s chaperoning a CYO dance and I have to go to, uh—”

  “The Boy Scout Council,” I suggested.

  “That’s it exactly, the annual award dinner of the Boy Scout Area Council. They’re going to give me a merit badge for buggery, it’s one of the most sought-after awards. You’re a funny man, Scudder. You’re costing me a great deal of money, but at least I get a few laughs out of it.”

  AFTER I got off the phone with Stettner I called a car rental agency in the neighborhood and reserved a car. I didn’t pick it up right away but walked instead to Coliseum Books, where I picked up a Hagstrom map of Queens. On my way out of the bookstore I realized I was just down the street from the gallery where I’d left the original Ray Galindez sketches for framing. They had done a nice job, and as I looked at the pencil drawings behind their shield of non-glare glass I tried to see them purely as art. I wasn’t entirely successful. I kept seeing two dead boys and the man who killed them.

  They wrapped them for me and I paid with my credit card and carried the package back to my hotel. I stowed it in the closet and spent a few minutes studying the map of Queens. I went out for a sandwich and a cup of coffee and read a newspaper, then came back and looked at the map some more. Around seven I walked over to the car-rental place and used my credit card again, and they put me behind the wheel of a gray Toyota Corolla with sixty-two hundred miles on the clock. The gas tank was full and the ashtrays were empty, but whoever had vacuumed the interior had done a less than perfect job.

  I had the map with me but I got there without referring to it, taking the Midtown Tunnel and the Long Island Expressway and exiting just after the BQE interchange. There was some traffic on the LIE but not too much of it, with most of the commuters in front of their television sets by now. I cruised around the area, and when I reached the New Maspeth Arena I circled the block slowly once and found a place to park.

  I sat there for an hour or more like a lazy old cop on a stakeout. At one point I had to take a leak, and I hadn’t brought along an empty quart jar, the way I’d learned to do years ago. The fact that the neighborhood was deserted and I hadn’t seen a soul in the past half hour made me positively reckless, and I drove two blocks and got out of the car to pee with abandon against a brick wall. I went around the block and parked in another spot across the street from the arena. The whole street was a car owner’s dream, just one empty parking space after another.

  Around nine or a little past it I left the Toyota and walked over to the arena. I took my time, paying close attention, and when I got back in the car I got out my notebook and made some sketches. I had the dome light on, but not for very long.

  At ten I took a different route and drove back to the city. The kid at the garage said he had to charge me for a full day. “Might as well keep her overnight,” he said. “Bring her back tomorrow afternoon, won’t cost you a nickel more.”

  I told him I had no further use for it. The garage was on Eleventh Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth. I walked a block east, then south. I checked at Armstrong’s but didn’t see anyone I recognized, and just for the hell of it I looked in the door of Pete’s All-American to see if Durkin was there. He wasn’t. I’d spoken to him a few days earlier, and he’d said he hoped he hadn’t said anything out of line. I’d assured him he was a perfect gentleman.

  “Then that’s a first for me,” he said. “I don’t make a habit of it, but once in a while a man has to go and let the devil out.” I told him I knew what he meant.

  MICK wasn’t at Grogan’s. “He’ll probably be in later,” Burke said. “Sometime between now and closing.”

  I sat at the bar with a Coke, and when I’d finished it I switched to club soda. After a while Andy Buckley came in and Burke drew him a pint of the draft Guinness, and Andy took the stool next to mine and talked about basketball. I used to follow the game but I haven’t paid much attention to it in the past few years. That was all right because he was prepared to carry the whole conversation himself. He had gone to the Garden the night before and the Knicks had covered the spread with a three-pointer at the buzzer, winning his bet for him in the process.

  I let him talk me into a game of darts, but I wasn’t fool enough to bet with him. He could have played left-handed and beat me. We played a second game, and then I went back to the bar and drank another Coke and watched television and Andy stayed at the dart board sharpening his game.

  At one point I thought about going to the midnight meeting. When I first got sober there was a meeting every night at twelve at the Moravian church at Lexington and Thirtieth. Then they lost the meeting place and the group moved to Alanon House, an AA clubhouse that has had various locations in the theater district and is currently housed in a third-floor apartment on West Forty-sixth. At one point Alanon House was between locations, and some people started a new midnight meeting downtown on Houston Street near Varick, where the Village butts up against SoHo. The downtown group has added other meetings, including an insomniac’s special every morning at two.

  So I had a choice of midnight meetings, and I could tell Burke to let Mick know I was looking for him, and that I’d be back by one-thirty at the latest. But something stopped me, something kept me on my stool and led me to order another Coke when my glass was empty.

  I was in the john when Mick finally showed up a little before one. When I emerged he was at the bar with his bottle of JJ&S and his Waterford tumbler. “Good man,” he said. “Burke told me you were here and I said he should put on a pot of coffee. I hope you’re up for a long night.”

  “Just a short night tonight,” I said.

  “Ah, well,” he said. “Maybe I can get you to change your mind.”

  We sat at our usual table and he filled his glass and held it
to the light. “By God that’s a good color,” he said, and he took a drink.

  “If you ever quit drinking,” I said, “they make a cream soda that’s just about the same shade.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Of course you’d have to let it go flat,” I said, “or it’d have a head on it.”

  “Spoil the effect, wouldn’t it?” He took a drink and sighed. “Cream soda indeed,” he said.

  We talked about nothing much, and then I leaned forward and said, “Do you still need money, Mick?”

  “I’ve not got holes in my shoes,” he said.

  “No.”

  “But I always need money. I told you that the other night.”

  “You did.”

  “Why?”

  “I know where you can get some,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. He sat in silence for a moment, and a slight smile came and went, came and went. “How much money?”

  “A minimum of fifty thousand. Probably a lot more than that.”

  “Whose money?”

  A good question. Joe Durkin had reminded me that money knows no owner. It was, he’d said, a principle of law.

  “A couple named Stettner,” I said.

  “Drug dealers?”

  “Close. He deals in currencies, launders money for a pair of Iranian brothers from Los Angeles.”

  “Eye-ranians,” he said, with relish. “Well, now. Maybe you should tell me more.”

  I must have talked for twenty minutes. I took out my notebook and showed him the sketches I’d made in Maspeth. There wasn’t that much to tell, but he took me back over various points, covering everything thoroughly. He didn’t say anything for a minute or two, and then he filled his glass with whiskey and drank it down as if it were cool water on a hot afternoon.

  “Tomorrow night,” he said. “Four men, I’d say. Two men and myself, and Andy for the driving. Tom would do for one of them, and either Eddie or John. You know Tom. You don’t know Eddie or John.”

  Tom was the day bartender, a pale tight-lipped man from Belfast. I’d always wondered what he did with his evenings.

  “Maspeth,” he said. “Can any good thing come out of Maspeth? By God, there we sat watching the niggers punching each other and all the time there’s a money laundry beneath our feet. Is that why you went out there then? And brought me along for company?”

  “No, it was work took me out there, but I was working on something else at the time.”

  “But you kept your eyes open.”

  “You could say that.”

  “And put two and two together,” he said. “Well, it’s just the kind of situation I can use. I don’t mind telling you, you’ve surprised me.”

  “How?”

  “By bringing this to me. It seems unlike you. It’s more than a man does out of friendship.”

  “You pay a finder’s fee,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  “Ah,” he said, and a curious light came into his eyes. “That I do,” he said. “Five percent.”

  He excused himself to make a phone call. While he was gone I sat there and looked at the bottle and the glass. I could have had some of the coffee Burke had made but I didn’t want any. I didn’t want the booze either.

  When he came back I said, “Five percent’s not enough.”

  “Oh?” His face hardened. “By God, you’re full of surprises tonight, aren’t you? I thought I knew ye. What’s the matter with five percent, and how much is it you think you ought to have?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with five percent,” I said. “For a finder’s fee. I don’t want a finder’s fee.”

  “You don’t? Well, what in hell do you want?”

  “A full share,” I said. “I want to be a player. I want to go in.”

  He sat back and looked at me. He poured a drink but didn’t touch it, breathed in and breathed out and looked at me some more.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said finally. “Well, I’ll be fucking damned.”

  Chapter 22

  In the morning I finally got around to stowing The Dirty Dozen in my safe-deposit box. I bought an ordinary copy to take to Maspeth, then began to imagine some of the things that might go wrong. I returned to the bank and retrieved the genuine article, and I left the replacement cassette in the box so I wouldn’t mix them up later on.

  If I got killed out in Maspeth, Joe Durkin could watch the cassette over and over, searching for a hidden meaning.

  All day long I kept thinking that I ought to go to a meeting. I hadn’t been to one since Sunday night. I thought I’d go at lunch hour but didn’t, and then I thought about a Happy Hour meeting around five-thirty, and finally figured I’d catch at least the first half of my usual meeting at St. Paul’s. But I kept finding other things to do.

  At ten-thirty I walked over to Grogan’s.

  Mick was there, and we went into his office in the back. There’s an old wooden desk there, and a safe, along with a pair of old-fashioned wooden office chairs and a Naugahyde recliner. There’s an old green leather sofa, too, and sometimes he’ll catch a few hours on it. He told me once he has three apartments around town, each of them rented in a name other than his own, and of course he has the farm upstate.

  “You’re the first,” he said. “Tom and Andy’ll be here by eleven. Matt, have you thought it over?”

  “Some.”

  “Have you had second thoughts, man?”

  “Why should I?”

  “It’s no harm if you do. There’ll likely be bloodshed. I told you that last night.”

  “I remember.”

  “You’ll have to carry a gun. And if you carry one—”

  “You have to be willing to use it. I know that.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” he said. “Are ye sure ye have the heart for it, man?”

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?”

  He opened the safe and showed me several guns. The one he recommended was a SIG Sauer 9-mm automatic. It weighed a ton and I figured you could stop a runaway train with it. I played with it, working the slide, taking the clip out and putting it back, and I liked the feel of it. It was a nice piece of machinery and it looked intimidating as all hell. But I wound up giving it back and choosing a .38 S&W short-barreled revolver instead. It lacked the SIG Sauer’s menacing appearance, to say nothing of its stopping power, but it rode more comfortably tucked under my belt in the small of my back. More to the point, it was a close cousin to the piece I’d carried for years on the job.

  Mick took the SIG for himself.

  By eleven Tom and Andy had both arrived, and each had come into the office to select a weapon. We kept the office door closed, of course, and we were all pacing around, talking about the good weather, telling each other it would be a piece of cake. Then Andy went out and brought the car around and we filed out of Grogan’s and got into it.

  The car was a Ford, a big LTD Crown Victoria about five years old. It was long and roomy, with a big trunk and a powerful engine. I thought at first it had been stolen for the occasion, but it turned out to be a car Ballou had bought a while back. Andy Buckley kept it garaged up in the Bronx and drove it on occasions of this sort. The plates were legitimate but if you ran them you wouldn’t get anywhere; the name and address on the registration were fictitious.

  Andy drove crosstown on Fifty-seventh Street and we took the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge into Queens. I liked his route better than the one I had taken. Nobody talked much once we were in the car, and after we crossed the bridge the silence was only rarely interrupted. Maybe a locker room’s like that in the minutes before a championship game. Or maybe not; in sports they don’t shoot the losers.

  I don’t suppose the trip took us much more than half an hour door to door. There was no traffic to speak of and Andy knew the route cold. So it must have been somewhere around midnight when we reached the arena. He had not been driving fast, and he slowed down now to around twenty miles an hour and we looked at the building and scanned the surrounding area as we coasted on
by.

  We went up one street and down another, and from time to time we would pass the arena and take a good look at it. The streets were as empty as they’d been the night before, and the lateness of the hour made them seem even more desolate. After we’d cruised around for twenty minutes or more Mick told him to give it a rest.

  “Keep driving back and forth and some fucking cop’s going to pull us over and ask if we’re lost.”

  “I haven’t seen a cop since we crossed the bridge,” Andy said.

  Mick was up front next to Andy. I was in back with Tom, who hadn’t opened his mouth since we left Mick’s office.

  “We’re early,” Andy said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Park near the place but not on top of it,” Mick told him. “We’ll sit and wait. If somebody rousts us we’ll go home and get drunk.”

  We wound up parked half a block from the arena on the opposite side of the street. Andy cut the engine and shut off the lights. I sat there trying to figure out which precinct we were in so I’d know who might come along and roust us. It was either the 108 or the 104, and I couldn’t remember where the boundary ran or where we were in relation to it. I don’t know how long I sat there, frowning in concentration, trying to picture the map of Queens in my mind, trying to impose a map of the precincts on top of it. Nothing could have mattered less, but my mind groped with the question as if the fate of the world depended on the answer.

  I still hadn’t settled it when Mick turned to me and pointed at his watch. It was one o’clock. It was time to go in.

  * * *

  I had to walk in there alone. That figured to be the easy part, but it didn’t feel so easy when it was time to do it. There was no way to know what kind of reception awaited me. If Bergen Stettner had decided reasonably enough that it was cheaper and safer to kill me than to pay me off, all he had to do was open the door a crack and gun me down before I so much as set eyes on him. You could fire a cannon and no one would hear it, or give a damn if they did.

  And I didn’t even know that they were there. I was right on time and they figured to have been in place hours ago. They were the hosts, and it made no sense for them to arrive late to their own party. Still, I hadn’t seen a car on the street that figured to be theirs, and there’d been no signs of life in the arena visible to us out on the street.