A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

Chapter 16

"The rest was pretty much the way we figured," I told Durkin. "They tied him up and knocked him around a little to make it look good, set the stage so it fit the profile of a bungled burglary. They walked out and went home, and he called it in an hour or so later, whenever it was. He had his story all ready. He'd had days to work it out, all the while he was telling himself it was a joke."

"And now he wants to hire you."

"He did hire me," I said. "Last night, before we parted company."

"What for?"

"He's afraid of the Stettners. Afraid they'll kill him."

"Why would they do that?"

"To cover their asses. His conscience has been bothering him."

"I should fucking hope so."

"Well, according to him, it has. He keeps having the thought that she really loved him and she was the only person who ever did or ever will."

"Only person damn fool enough."

"And he wants to believe that she died without realizing he was a part of her murder. That she was unconscious when he had sex with her, that she was either unconscious or already dead when Stettner made him strangle her."

"He wants the answer to that one, he doesn't need a detective, he needs a medium."

It was midmorning, Thursday. I had gone to Midtown North after breakfast and waited for Joe to show, and we were at his desk now. He had a cigarette going. He must have quit smoking a dozen times that I knew about. He couldn't seem to stay off it.

I said, "He thinks his conscience is showing. And he thinks Stettner doesn't need him anymore."

"How did Stettner need him in the first place, Matt? It sounds to me like he's making Stettner the heavy when he was the one using Stettner instead of the other way around. Way I figure it he got a mil and a half out of the deal, and what did Stettner get? A quick piece of ass with a woman who's half-dead?"

"So far," I said, "Stettner got four hundred thousand dollars."

"I must have missed that part."

"I was just getting to it. After it was all over, after she was buried and the press coverage had died down, Stettner had a talk with him. He said their little joint venture had been a great success, but of course if it was indeed a joint venture it was only fair that the proceeds be shared jointly."

"In other words, come up with half the dough."

"That's the idea. Not the money he inherited from his wife, Stettner was willing to overlook that, but certainly the insurance proceeds. As soon as the insurance company paid up, he wanted half. It was a million with the double indemnity, since murder is accidental death-"

"Which I never understood."

"Neither did I, but I guess it's an accident from the point of view of the victim. Anyway, it came to a million tax-free, and Stettner wanted half of it. The insurance company paid up late last month, which seems pretty quick in a case like this."

"They had a guy over here," he said. "Wanted to know if Thurman was a suspect. Officially he wasn't, which is what I had to tell him. I was convinced he did it, I told you that-"

"Yes."

"- but the only motive we had was the money, and we couldn't establish any need for the money, or anybody else he was mixed up with, or any reason to kill her." He frowned. "What you've been telling me is he really didn't have a reason."

"Not the way he tells it. But the insurance company paid, and Stettner wanted his, and the way they worked it was that Thurman would turn over cash to Stettner in increments of a hundred thousand dollars that would ostensibly be used to purchase foreign currencies. The money would just go in Stettner's pocket, but Thurman would get memos of nonexistent transactions and they'd be structured in such a way that he would ultimately be able to write off most of it as losses for tax purposes. I think that may be my favorite part, Joe. Split the proceeds with your partner in crime and write it off on your taxes."

"It's not bad. He's made four of these payments?"

"At one-week intervals. The final payment's due tonight. He'll be meeting Stettner in Maspeth, he's producing a telecast at a boxing arena out there. He'll turn over a briefcase with a hundred grand in it and that'll be that."

"And then he thinks Stettner'll kill him. Because he'll have the money and he won't need Thurman anymore, and Thurman's just a loose end and is starting to develop a conscience, so why not close the account?"

"Right."

"And he wants you to protect him," he said. "Did he happen to say how?"

"We left it open. I'm meeting him this afternoon to figure all that out."

"And then you go out to whatchacallit, Maspeth?"

"Probably."

He stubbed out his cigarette. "Why you?"

"He knows me."

"He knows you? How does he know you?"

"We met in a bar."

"So you said, last night in that shithole your friend Ballou owns. Incidentally, I don't know what the hell you're doing keeping company with a guy like that."

"He's a friend of mine."

"One of these days he's gonna step on his cock and you don't want to be there when it happens. He's a good dancer, he's slippery as a fucking eel, but one of these days the Feds'll put a RICO case together and he's got free room and board in Atlanta."

" 'Mother of mercy, is this the end of RICO?' "

"Huh?"

"Nothing," I said. "It's not important. We met at Grogan's last night because we needed a quiet place to talk. The reason he called me is we ran into each other the night before in another bar, a place in his neighborhood."

"You ran into him because you're on his case. Did he know that?"

"No. He thought I was on Stettner's case."

"Why would you be on Stettner's case?"

I hadn't told him anything about the tape of Happy's murder, or about the killing of Arnold Leveque. All of that seemed extraneous. The case in Joe's open file was the murder of Amanda Thurman, and that was the case I'd been hired for and the one that looked to be breaking.

"It was a way to hook him," I said. "I'd managed to connect him with Stettner, and that turned out to be the shoe in the door. If he can hang it all on Bergen and Olga, maybe he can get off the hook himself."

"You think you can get him to come in, Matt?"

"That's what I'm hoping. That's what I'll be working on when I see him this afternoon."

"I want you wearing a wire when you see him."

"Fine."

" 'Fine.' I wish to God you'd been wearing a wire when you saw him last night. You can get lucky, a guy feels like talking, he spills his guts and feels better. Then he gets up the next morning and wonders what got into him, and for the rest of his life he never gets the urge to open up again. Why the hell didn't you come in and get a wire before you saw him?"

"Come on," I said. "He called out of the blue at ten and wanted to meet me right away. Were you even here last night?"

"There's other people could have fitted you with a wire."

"Sure, and it only would have taken two hours and ten phone calls to clear it, and I had no realistic reason to think he was going to open up like that in the first place."

"Yeah, you're right."

"I think I can get him to come in," I said. "I think that's what he wants to do."

"That'd be nice," he said. "But if not at least he'll talk to you, and you'll be wearing a wire. You're meeting him at four? I wish it was earlier."

"He's got appointments until then."

"And business is business, right? I'll see you here at three." He stood up. "Meantime I got appointments myself."

I walked across town to Elaine's, stopping en route for flowers and a bag of Jaffa oranges. She put the flowers in water and the oranges in a large blue glass bowl and told me she was feeling a lot better. "Weak," she said, "but definitely on the mend. What about you? Are you all right?"

"Why?"

"You look drawn. Were you up again last night?"

"No, but I didn't sleep very well. The case is breaking. It ought to wrap up in a couple more hours."

"How did all that happen? It's Wednesday, isn't it? Or did I get delirious and miss a couple of days?"

"Thurman needed a confidant and I managed to be it. He was feeling pressured, partly by me, I suppose, but mostly by Stettner."

"Who's Stettner?"

"Rubber Man," I said. I gave her an abridged version of our conversation last night at Grogan's. "I was in the right place at the right time," I said. "I was lucky."

"Unlike Amanda Thurman."

"And a whole lot of other people, from the sound of it. But Amanda's the one they'll all go away for. Between Thurman's testimony and whatever physical evidence they can put together, they ought to be able to build a nice solid case."

"Then why so glum, chum? Shouldn't you be strutting around like a bantam rooster? Whatever happened to enjoying the moment of triumph?"

"I guess I'm tired."

"And what else?"

I shrugged. "I don't know," I said. "I spent a couple of hours with Thurman last night. It didn't make me like the little prick but it didn't leave me ready to rejoice in his downfall, either. A week ago he looked to be some kind of cold criminal genius, and now it turns out he's just a dimwit. A couple of manipulative perverts led him around by his cock."

"You feel sorry for him."

"I don't feel sorry for him. I think he's a manipulative bastard himself, he just ran into a better one in Stettner. And I'm not buying everything he told me last night. I don't think he fed me any outright lies, but I think he made himself look better than he had any right to. For one thing, I'll bet anything Amanda wasn't the first person he killed."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because Stettner's not stupid. He knew the cops would grill Thurman up one side and down the other if his wife was murdered under that sort of circumstances. Even if they didn't suspect he was involved, they'd question him repeatedly in order to get a line on the killers and not overlook any possible clue. So Stettner would have tempered him first by getting him accustomed to killing. He was there when Leveque was killed, he was an accessory, and I think there must have been times when he and one or both of the Stettners did a number on a woman and she wound up dead. That's what I would have done if I were Stettner."

"I'm glad you're not."

"And I'm not sure how much I buy of his attack of conscience," I said. "I think he's scared, I think that part's true enough. Once Stettner gets the last hundred grand from him he's got no reason to keep him alive. Unless he wants to try for the rest of the money, which is always a possibility. Maybe that's Thurman's real fear. He doesn't want to give up the rest of the money."

"He can't keep it anyway, can he? If he confesses?"

"He doesn't intend to confess."

"But I thought you said you were going to bring him in."

"I'm going to try. I'm hoping I can manipulate him the way Stettner did."

"You want me to come along and blow him?"

"I don't think that'll be necessary."

"Good."

"See," I said, "I think he's trying to manipulate me. Maybe he wants me to kill Stettner for him. That seems farfetched, but it's not out of the question. He may want my help in arranging some sort of Mexican standoff, whereby he leaves evidence and testimony that will nail Stettner in the event of his own death. If he sets that up right and Stettner knows it, then he's home free."

"But any evidence he gives you-"

"Goes straight to Joe Durkin. Damn it."

"What's the matter?"

"It's eleven-thirty and I'm not seeing him until four. I should have kept pressing him last night instead of giving him time to think it over. The problem was that he was exhausted and so was I. I thought we'd do it this morning but he went into this song and dance about his business appointments. I wanted to tell him he could afford to cancel, that he was out of business, but I couldn't do that. You know, he called me a few times yesterday afternoon and wouldn't talk."

"You told me."

"If I could have got together with him then it might be wrapped up by now. Of course I wouldn't have talked to Danny Boy and I wouldn't have gone in knowing about Stettner." I sighed. "I guess it'll all work out."

"It always does, baby. Why don't you lie down for an hour or two? Take the bed, or I'll make up the couch for you."

"I don't think so."

"It won't hurt you. And I'll wake you in plenty of time to go see Joe and get wired."

"I'm already wired. In a manner of speaking."

"That's my point."

I caught a noon meeting and walked back to my hotel, stopping for a stand-up lunch at a pizza parlor. I had pepperoni on it to make sure I covered the four basic food groups.

Maybe the meeting relaxed me, or maybe it was the result of good nutrition, but when I got back to my room I felt tired enough to lie down for an hour. I set my alarm for two-thirty and left a call at the desk for that time as a backup. I kicked my shoes off and stretched out in my clothes, and I must have been out before my eyes were completely shut.

The next thing I knew the phone was ringing. I sat up and looked at my clock and it was only two, and I picked up the phone prepared to snarl at the desk clerk. TJ said, "Man, why is it you ain't never home? How I gone tell you what I find if I can't even find where you at?"

"What did you find out?"

"The boy's name. The young one. I met this kid who knows him, says his name be Bobby."

"Did you learn his last name?"

"There ain't a lot of last names on the Deuce, Matt. Ain't too many first names, either. Mostly it's street names, you know? Cool Fool and Hats and Dagwood. Bobby, he too new on the block to have hisself a street name. Kid I talked to say he just got here around Christmastime."

He hadn't lasted long. I wanted to tell TJ that it didn't matter, that the man who'd been with Bobby was about to go away for something else, something that would keep him away from kids for a long time.

"Don't know where he came from," TJ was saying. "Got off a bus one day is all. Musta come from some place where they had men who liked young boys, 'cause that what he was lookin' for from the jump. 'Fore he knew it one of the pimps scooped him up an' started sellin' his white ass."

"What pimp?"

"You want for me to find out? I most likely could, but the meter already run to the twenty-dollar mark."

Was there any point? The easy case against Stettner was the murder of Amanda Thurman. There was a body and a witness and, in all likelihood, some kind of physical evidence, all of them lacking in the disappearance and probably murder of the boy called Bobby. Why bother to chase some pimp?

"See what you can find out," I heard myself say. "I'll cover the meter."

AT three I presented myself at Midtown North and took off my jacket and shirt. A police officer named Westerberg wired me for sound. "You've worn one of these before," Durkin said. "With that landlady, one the papers called the Angel of Death."

"That's right."

"So you know how it works. You shouldn't have any trouble with Thurman. If he wants you to go to bed with him just make sure you keep your shirt on."

"He won't want me to. He doesn't like homosexuals."

"Right, nothing queer about Richard. You want a vest? I think you ought to wear one."

"On top of the wire?"

"It's Kevlar, it shouldn't interfere with the pickup. The only thing it's supposed to stop is a bullet."

"There won't be any bullets, Joe. Nobody's used a gun in this so far. The vest won't stop a blade."

"Sometimes it will."

"Or a pair of panty hose around the neck."

"I guess," he said. "I just don't like the idea of sending you in without backup."

"You're not sending me in. I'm not under your command. I'm a private citizen wearing a wire out of a sense of civic responsibility. I'm cooperating with you, but you're not responsible for my safety."

"I'll remember to tell them that at the hearing after you wind up in a body bag."

"That's not going to happen," I said.

"Say Thurman woke up this morning and realized he talked too much, and now you're the loose end he has to get rid of."

I shook my head. "I'm his ace in the hole," I said. "I'm his backup, I'm the man who can make sure Stettner won't take a chance on killing him. Hell, he hired me, Joe. He's not going to kill me."

"He hired you?"

"Last night. He gave me a retainer, insisted I take it."

"What did he give you?"

"A hundred dollars. A nice crisp hundred-dollar bill."

"Hey, every little bit helps."

"I didn't keep it."

"What do you mean, you didn't keep it? You gave it back to him, how's he gonna trust you?"

"I didn't give it back to him. I got rid of it."

"Why? Money's money. It doesn't know where it came from."

"Maybe not."

"Money knows no owner. Basic principle of law. How'd you get rid of it?"

"Walking home," I said. "We walked as far as Ninth Avenue and Fifty-second Street and then he went one way and I went the other. The first guy who staggered out of a doorway looking for a handout, I wadded up Thurman's money and stuck it in his cup. They all have cups now, Styrofoam coffee cups that they hold out at you."

"That's so people won't have to touch them. You gave some bum on the street a hundred-dollar bill? How's he gonna spend it? Who's gonna change it for him?"

"Well," I said, "that's not my problem, is it?"