A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

Chapter 10

The cops at the Twentieth Precint weren't overly impressed that I'd been on the job once myself. They were courteous all the same, and would have been happy to fill me in on the circumstances of Arnold Leveque's death. There was only one problem. They had never heard of him.

"I don't know the date," I said, "but it happened sometime between April nineteenth and June fourth, and if I were guessing I'd say early May."

"That's of last year."

"Right."

"That's Arnold Leveque? You want to spell the last name again, make sure I got it right?"

I did, and supplied the Columbus Avenue address. "That's here in the Two-oh," he said. "Lemme see if anybody heard of the guy." No one had. He came back and we puzzled over it for a few minutes, and then he excused himself again. He came back with a bemused expression on his face.

"Arnold Leveque," he said. "Male Caucasian, died nine May. Multiple stab wounds. Not in our files because it wasn't our case. He was killed on the other side of Fifty-ninth Street. You want Midtown North, that's on West Fifty-fourth."

I told him I knew where it was.

THAT explained why Herta Eigen got the runaround from the cops at her local precinct- they hadn't known what she was talking about. I'd walked up to the Twentieth first thing after breakfast, and it was mid-morning when I got to Midtown North. Durkin wasn't in, but I didn't need him to run interference for me on this. Anybody could give me the information.

There was a cop named Andreotti whom I'd met a few times over the past year or two. He was at a desk catching up on his paperwork and didn't mind an interruption. "Leveque, Leveque," he said. He frowned and ran a hand through a mop of shaggy black hair. "I think I caught that one, me and Bellamy. A fat guy, right?"

"So they tell me."

"You see so many stiffs in a week you can't keep ' em straight. He musta been murdered. Natural causes, you can't even remember their names."

"No."

"Except if it's the kind of name you can't forget. There was a woman two, three weeks back, Wanda Plainhouse. I thought, yeah, I wouldn't mind playin' house with you." He smiled at the memory, then said, "Of course she was alive, Wanda, but it's an example of how one name'll stick in your mind."

He pulled Leveque's file. The film buff had been found in a narrow alley between two tenements on Forty-ninth Street west of Tenth Avenue. The body had been discovered after an anonymous call to 911 logged in at 6:56 on the morning of May 9th. The medical examiner estimated the time of death at around eleven the previous night. The deceased had been stabbed seven times in the chest and abdomen with a long, narrow-bladed knife. Any of several of the wounds would have been sufficient to cause death.

"Forty-ninth between Tenth and Eleventh," I said.

"Closer to Eleventh. The buildings on either side were scheduled for demolition, X's on the windows and nobody living in 'em. I think they might have come down by now."

"I wonder what he was doing there."

Andreotti shrugged. "Looking for something and unlucky enough to find it. Looking to buy dope, looking for a woman or a man. Everybody's out there looking for something."

I thought of TJ. Everybody's got a jones, he'd said, or what would they be doing on the Deuce?

I asked if Leveque had been a drug user. No outward signs of it, he said, but you never knew. "Maybe he was drunk," he offered. "Staggering around, didn't know where he was. No, that's not it. Blood alcohol's not much more than a trace. Well, whatever he was looking for, he picked the wrong place to look for it."

"You figured robbery?"

"No money in his pockets, no watch and wallet. Sounds like a killer with a crack habit and a switchblade."

"How'd you ID him?"

"The landlady where he lived. She was some piece of work, man. About this high, but she wasn't taking no shit. Let us into his room and stood there watching us like a hawk, like we'll clean the place out if she turns her back. You'd think it was her stuff, which it probably wound up being, because I don't think we ever did turn up any next of kin." He flipped through the few sheets of paper. "No, I don't think we did. Anyway, she ID'd him. She didn't want to go. 'Why I got to look at a dead body? I seen enough in my life, believe me.' But she took a good look and said it was him."

"How did you know to ask her? What gave you his name and address?"

"Oh, I get you. That's a good question. How did we know?" He frowned, paging through the file. "Prints," he said. "His prints were in the computer and that gave us the name and address."

"How did his prints happen to be on file?"

"I don't know. Maybe he was in the service, maybe he had a government job once. You know how many people got their prints on file?"

"Not in the NYPD computer."

"Yeah, you're right." He frowned. "Did we have him or did we have to hook into the main system in Washington? I don't remember. Somebody else probably took care of it. Why?"

"Did you see if he's got a sheet?"

"If he did it must have been jaywalking. There's no notation in his file."

"Could you check?"

He grumbled but did it anyway. "Yeah, just one entry," he said. "Arrested four, almost five years ago. Released OR and charges dropped."

"What charges?"

He squinted at the computer screen. "Violation of Section 235 of the Criminal Code. What the hell is that, it's not a number I'm familiar with." He grabbed up the black looseleaf binder and flipped through it. "Here you go. Obscenity. Maybe he called somebody a bad name. Charges dismissed, and four years later somebody sticks a knife in him. Teach you not to talk nasty, wouldn't it?"

I probably could have learned more about Leveque if Andreotti had felt like jockeying the computer, but he had things of his own to do. I went to the main library on Forty-second Street and checked the Times Index on the chance that Arnold Leveque might have made the paper, but he'd managed to be spared publicity when he got arrested and when he got killed.

I took the subway down to Chambers Street and visited a few state and city government offices, where I found several public employees who were willing to do me a favor if I did them favors in return. They checked their records, and I slipped them some money.

I managed to learn that Arnold Leveque had been born thirty-eight years ago in Lowell, Massachusetts. By the time he was twenty-three he was in New York, living at the Sloane House YMCA on West Thirty-fourth and working in the mailroom of a textbook publisher. A year later he had left the publisher and was working for a firm called R amp; J Merchandise, with an address on Fifth Avenue in the Forties. He was a salesclerk there. I don't know what they sold, and the firm no longer existed. There are a lot of little clip joints on that stretch of Fifth Avenue, salted in among the legitimate stores and having endless Going Out Of Business sales, hawking dubious ivory and jade, cameras and electronic gear. R amp; J might well have been one of them.

He was still at Sloane House then, and as far as I could tell he stayed there until he moved to Columbus Avenue in the fall of '79. The move may have been prompted by a job switch; a month earlier he had started work at CBS, located a block west of my hotel on Fifty-seventh Street. He'd have been able to walk to work from his new lodgings.

I couldn't tell what he did at CBS, but they only paid him $16,000 a year to do it, so I don't suppose they made him president of the network. He was at CBS a little over three years, and he was up to $18,500 when he left in October of '82.

As far as I could tell he hadn't worked since.

THERE was mail for me back at the hotel. I could join an international association of retired police officers and attend annual conventions in Fort Lauderdale. The benefits of membership included a membership card, a handsome lapel pin, and a monthly newsletter. What on earth could they run in the newsletter? Obituaries?

There was a message to call Joe Durkin. I caught him at his desk, and he said, "I understand Thurman's not enough for you. You're trying to clear all our open files."

"Just trying to be helpful."

" Arnold Leveque. How does he tie into Thurman?"

"He probably doesn't."

"Oh, I don't know. He got it in May and she got it in November, almost six months to the day. Looks to me like a definite pattern's shaping up."

"The MO's a little different."

"Well, she was raped and strangled by burglars and he got knifed in an alleyway, but that's just because the killers want to throw us off track. Seriously, you got anything going with Leveque?"

"It's hard to say. I wish I knew what he did the last seven years of his life."

"Hung out in bad neighborhoods, evidently. What else does a man have to do?"

"He didn't work and he wasn't collecting welfare or SSI that I can tell. I saw where he lived and his rent couldn't amount to much, but he had to have money from somewhere."

"Maybe he came into some money. It worked for Amanda Thurman."

"That would give them another point of similarity," I said. "I like your line of reasoning."

"Yeah, well, my mind never stops working. Even when I sleep."

"Especially when you sleep."

"You got it. What's this about he didn't work in seven years? He was working when they arrested him."

"Not according to the state records."

"Well, screw the state records," he said. "That's how he got cracked, he was the clerk when they violated the place for obscenity. Leveque, he's French, I guess they got him for postcards, don't you figure?"

"He was selling pornography?"

"Didn't you get that from Andreotti?"

"Uh-uh. Just the number of the code violation."

"Well, he could have got more than that with a little digging. They did a sweep of Times Square whenever it was, October of '85. Oh, sure, I remember that. It was right before the election; the mayor wanted to look good. I wonder what the new guy's gonna be like."

"I wouldn't want his job."

"Oh, Christ, if it was be mayor or hang myself I'd say, 'Gimme the rope.' Anyway, Leveque. They hit all the stores, bagged all the clerks, hauled off all the dirty magazines and called a press conference. A few guys spent a night in jail and that was the end of it. All charges were dropped."

"And they gave back the dirty books."

He laughed. "There's a stack of them in a warehouse somewhere," he said, "that nobody'll find till the twenty-third century. Of course, a few choice items might have been taken home to spice up some policeman's marriage."

"I'm shocked."

"Yeah, I figured you'd be. No, I don't guess they gave back the confiscated merchandise. But we had a guy just the other day, a street dealer, we locked him up and he walked on a technicality, and he wants to know can he have his dope back."

"Oh, come on, Joe."

"I swear to God. So Nickerson says to him, 'Look, Maurice, if I give you your dope back then I'll have to grab you for possession.' Just shucking him, you know? And the asshole says, 'No, man, you can't do that. Where's your probable cause?' Nick says what do you mean probable cause, my probable cause is I just handed you the fucking dope an' I seen you put it in your pocket. Maurice says no, it'd never stand up, I'd skate. And do you want to know something? I think he's probably right."

JOE gave me the address of the Times Square store where Leveque had taken his brief fall. It was on the block between Eighth and Broadway, right on the Deuce, and since I could tell that from the number I didn't see any reason why I should go down there and look at it. I didn't know if he'd worked there for a day or a year and there was no way I was going to find out. Even if they wanted to tell me, it was unlikely that anybody knew.

I went over my notes for a few minutes, then leaned back and put my feet up. When I closed my eyes I got a quick flash of the man in Maspeth, the perfect father, smoothing his kid's hair back.

I decided I was reading too much into a gesture. I really didn't have a clue what the guy in the movie looked like under all that black rubber. Maybe the boy had looked like the youth in the film, maybe that was what had triggered my memory.

And even if it was the right guy? How was I going to find him by sniffing the fading spoor of some sad bastard who'd been dead for the better part of a year?

Thursday I'd seen them at the fights. It was Monday now. If it was his son, if the whole thing was innocent, then I was just spinning my wheels. If not, then I was too late.

If he'd planned to kill the boy, to spill his blood down the drain in the floor, it was odds-on he'd done it by now.

But why take him to the fights in the first place? Maybe he liked to work out an elaborate little psychodrama, maybe he had a protracted affair with a victim first. That would explain why the boy in the film had been so unafraid, even blasé about being tied up on a torture rack.

If the boy was dead already there was nothing I could do for him. If he was alive there wasn't much I could do, either, because I was light years from identifying and locating Rubber Man and I was closing on him at a snail's pace.

All I had was a dead man. And what did I have there? Leveque died with a tape, and the tape showed Rubber Man killing a boy. Leveque had died violently, probably but not necessarily the victim of an ordinary mugging in a part of town where muggings were commonplace. Leveque had worked at a porno shop. He'd worked there off the books, so he could have worked there for years, except that Gus Giesekind had said that he stayed in most of the time, unlike a man with a regular job.

And his last regular job-

I reached for the phone book and looked up a number. When the machine answered I left a message. Then I grabbed my coat and headed over to Armstrong's.

HE was at the bar when I walked in, a slender man with a goatee and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a brown corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches and smoking a pipe with a curved stem. He would have looked perfectly at home in Paris, sipping an aperitif in a café on the Left Bank. Instead he was drinking Canadian ale in a Fifty-seventh Street saloon, but he didn't look out of place.

"Manny," I said, "I just left you a message."

"I know," he said. "It was still recording when I walked in the door. You said you'd look for me here, so I walked right back out the door again. I didn't have to stop to put my coat on because I hadn't had time to take it off. And, since I live closer to this joint than you do-"

"You got here first."

"So it would appear. Shall we get a table? It's good to see you, Matt. I don't see enough of you."

We used to see each other almost daily when Jimmy's old Ninth Avenue place had been a second home to me. Manny Karesh had been a regular there, dropping in for an hour or so, sometimes hanging around for a whole evening. He was a technician at CBS and lived around the corner. Never a heavy drinker, he came to Jimmy's as much for the food as the beer, and more than either for the company.

We took a table and I ordered coffee and a hamburger and we brought each other up to date. He'd retired, he told me, and I said I'd heard something to that effect.

"I'm working as much as ever," he said. "Free-lancing, sometimes for my former employers and for anyone else who'll hire me. I have all the work I could want, and at the same time I'm collecting my pension."

"Speaking of CBS," I said.

"Were we?"

"Well, we are now. There's a fellow I want to ask you about because you might have known him some years ago. He worked there for three years and left in the fall of '82."

He took his pipe from his mouth and nodded. "Arnie Leveque," he said. "So he called you after all. I had wondered if he would. Why are you looking so puzzled?"

"Why would he call me?"

"You mean he didn't call you? Then why-"

"You first. Why would he have called?"

"Because he wanted a private detective. I ran into him on a shoot. It must have been, oh, six months ago."

Longer than that, I thought.

"And I don't know how it came up, but he wanted to know if I could recommend a detective, although I couldn't swear he used the word. I said that I knew a fellow, an ex-cop who lived right here in the neighborhood, and I gave him your name and said I didn't know your number offhand, but you lived at the Northwestern. You're still there?"

"Yes."

"And you're still doing that sort of work? I hope it was all right to give out your name."

"Of course it was," I said. "I appreciate it. But he never called me."

"Well, I haven't seen him since then, Matt, and I'm sure it's been six months, so if you haven't heard from him by now you probably won't."

"I'm sure I won't," I said, "and I'm pretty sure it's been more than six months. He's been dead since last May."

"You're not serious. He's dead? He was a young man. He carried far too much weight, of course, but even so." He took a sip of beer. "What happened to him?"

"He was killed."

"Oh, for God's sake. How?"

"Stabbed by a mugger. Apparently."

" 'Apparently.' There's a suspicion of foul play?"

"Mugging's reasonably foul play all by itself, but no, there's no official suspicion. Leveque ties into something I'm working on, or at least he may. Why did he want a private detective?"

"He didn't say." He frowned. "I didn't know him all that well. When he started at CBS he was young and eager. He was a technical assistant, part of a camera crew. I don't think he was with us very long."

"Three years."

"I would have said less than that."

"Why did he leave?"

He tugged at his beard. "My sense of it is that we let him go."

"Do you remember why?"

"I doubt that I'd have known in the first place. I don't know that he blotted his copybook, as our British cousins would say, but young Arnold never had what you might call a winning personality. He was a sort of overgrown nerd, which is not a word you'll hear me use often. Still, that's what he was, and he tended to be somewhat casual about matters of personal hygiene. Went a little long between shaves, and wore the same shirt a day or two more than custom dictates. And of course he was fat. Some men are as fat but carry their weight well. Arnold, alas, was not of their number."

"And afterward he got free-lance work?"

"Well, that's what he was doing the last time I ran into him. On the other hand, I've been free-lancing for several years now and I can think of only one other time we were on the same shoot. I guess he must have worked steadily enough, though, because he couldn't have missed many meals."

"He clerked for a while in a Times Square bookstore."

"You know," he said, "I can believe it. It somehow fits him. There was always something furtive about Arnie, something damp-palmed and out of breath. I can imagine someone slipping stealthily into one of those places and encountering Arnie behind the counter, rubbing his hands together and giving you a sly look." He winced. "My God, the man's dead, and look how I'm talking about him." He struck a match and got his pipe going again. "I've made him sound like the evil lab assistant in a Frankenstein remake. Well, he'd be a good choice for the part. Always speak ill of the dead, as my sainted mother used to advise me. Because they're in no position to get back at you."