A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

Chapter 19

I stayed close to home on Saturday, leaving during the day only to eat a sandwich and drink a cup of coffee and catch a noon meeting across the street from Phil Fielding's video store. At ten to eight I met Elaine in front of the Carnegie Recital Hall on Fifty-seventh. She had tickets for a series of chamber music concerts and felt well enough to use them. The group that night was a string quartet. The cellist was a black woman with a shaved head. The other three were Chinese-American males, all of them dressed and groomed like management trainees.

At intermission we made plans to go to Paris Green afterward, with maybe a quick stop at Grogan's, but by the time the second half ended we were less energetic. We went back to her apartment and ordered in Chinese food. I stayed over, and in the morning we went out for brunch.

Sunday I had dinner with Jim and went to the eight-thirty meeting at Roosevelt.

Monday morning I walked over to Midtown North. I had called ahead, so Durkin was expecting me. I had my notebook with me, as I almost always do. I had the videocassette of The Dirty Dozen, too. I had taken it with me when I left Elaine's the day before.

He said, "Sit down. You want some coffee?"

"I just had some."

"I wish I could say the same. What's on your mind?"

" Bergen Stettner."

"Yeah, well, I can't say I'm surprised. You're like a dog with a bone. What have you got?"

I handed him the cassette.

"Great picture," he said. "So?"

"This version is a little different from the way you may remember it. The highlight comes when Bergen and Olga Stettner commit murder on-camera."

"What are you talking about?"

"Someone dubbed another tape onto this cassette. After fifteen minutes of Lee Marvin we cut to amateur home video. Bergen and Olga and a friend, but by the time the movie is over the friend is dead."

He picked up the cassette, weighed it in his hand. "You're saying you've got a snuff film here."

"A snuff tape, anyway."

"And it's the Stettners? How in hell-"

"It's a long story."

"I got time."

"It's complicated, too."

"Well, it's good you caught me early in the day," he said. "While my mind's still fresh."

I must have talked for an hour. I told it from the beginning, with Will Haberman's panicky request that I scan the tape, and I went through the whole thing and didn't leave out anything important. Durkin had a spiral notebook on his desk, and early on he flipped it open to a clean page and began jotting things down. He would interrupt me from time to time to clarify a point, but for the most part he just let me tell it my way.

When I was done he said, "It's funny how it all fits together. If your friend doesn't happen to be the one who rents the tape, and if he doesn't happen to run to you with it, then there's never anything ties Thurman and Stettner together."

"And I probably don't have a wedge into Thurman," I agreed, "and he doesn't pick me to spill his guts to. The night I met him in Paris Green I was just fishing, I didn't really seem to be getting anywhere with him. I thought he might know Stettner because of the connection through Five Borough Cable, and because I'd seen them both at the New Maspeth Arena. I showed him the sketch just to shove him off-balance a little, and that was what got things going."

"And sent him out a window."

"But it was a coincidence that was trying to happen," I said. "I was almost involved in the whole thing before Haberman rented the tape. A friend of mine mentioned my name when Leveque was looking for a private detective. If he'd called me then he might never have been killed."

"Or you might have been killed with him." He passed the cassette from one hand to the other as if he wished someone would take it away from him. "I guess I have to look at this," he said. "There's a VCR in the lounge, if we can pry it away from the old hairbags who sit around all day watching Debbie do Dallas." He stood up. "Watch it with me, okay? I miss any of the subtleties, you can point 'em out to me."

The lounge was empty, and he hung a sign on the door to keep anybody from walking in on us. We fast-forwarded through the opening of The Dirty Dozen, and then the Stettners' home movie came on. At first he made cop comments, remarking on the costumes and on Olga's figure, but once the action was under way he fell silent. The movie had that effect. Nothing you could say was a match for what you were seeing.

While it was rewinding he said, "Jesus."

"Yeah."

"Tell me one more time about the kid they did. You said his name was Bobby?"

"Happy," I said. "Bobby was the younger one, the other sketch I gave you."

"Bobby's the one you saw at the fight. You never saw Happy?"

"No."

"No, of course not. How could you? He's already dead before you see the cassette, before Leveque gets killed, even. This is complicated, but you said it was, didn't you?" He got out a cigarette and tapped the end against the back of his hand. "I got to run this past some people. Upstairs, and most likely at the Manhattan DA's Office. This is very tricky."

"I know."

"Let me keep all of this, Matt. You'll be at the same number? The hotel?"

"I should be in and out the rest of the day."

"Yeah, well, don't be surprised if you don't hear anything today. Tomorrow's more likely, or it could even be Wednesday. I got other cases I'm supposed to be working, far as that goes, but I'm gonna move on this right away." He retrieved the cassette from the machine. "This is something," he said. "You ever see anything like this before?"

"No."

"I hate the shit you have to look at. When I was a kid, looking at the TPF guys up on top of their horses, you know, I had no idea."

"I know."

"No fucking idea at all," he said. "None."

I didn't hear from him until Wednesday evening. I was at St. Paul 's until ten o'clock, and when I got back to the hotel there were two messages. The first one, logged in at a quarter to nine, requested that I call him at the station house. He'd called again three-quarters of an hour later to leave a number I didn't recognize.

I made the call and asked the man who answered for Joe Durkin. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand but I could hear him call the name: "Joe Durkin? There a Joe Durkin here?" There was a pause, and then Joe came on the line.

"You keep late hours," I said.

"Yeah, well, I'm not on the city's time now. Listen, you got a few minutes? I want to talk with you."

"Sure."

"Come over here, huh? Where the hell is this place, anyway? Hold on a minute." He came back and said, "Name of the place is Pete's All-American, it's on-"

"I know where it is. Jesus."

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing at all," I said. "Is a sport jacket and tie all right or will I need a suit?"

"Don't be a wiseass."

"All right."

"The place is a little lowdown. You got a problem with that?"

"No problem."

"I'm in a lowdown mood. Where am I gonna go, the Carlyle? The Rainbow Room?"

"I'll be right over," I said.

Pete's All-American is on the west side of Tenth Avenue a block up from Grogan's. It's been there for generations but remains an unlikely candidate for the National Register of Historic Places. It has never been anything but a bucket of blood.

It smelled of stale beer and bad plumbing. The bartender looked up without interest when I came in the door. The half-dozen old lags at the bar didn't bother to turn around. I walked past them to a table in back where Joe was sitting with his back to the wall. There was an overflowing ashtray on the table, along with a rocks glass and a bottle of Hiram Walker Ten High. They aren't supposed to bring the bottle to the table like that, it's a violation of an SLA rule, but a lot of people will bend the rules for somebody who shows them a gold shield.

"You found the joint," he said. "Get yourself a glass."

"That's all right."

"Oh, right, you don't drink. Never touch the dirty stuff." He picked up his glass, drank some, made a face. "You want a Coke or something? You gotta get it yourself, they're not big on service here."

"Maybe later."

"Sit down then." He ground out his cigarette. "Jesus Christ, Matt. Jesus Christ."

"What's the matter?"

"Ah, shit," he said. He reached down beside him, came up with the videocassette and tossed it onto the table. It skidded off and landed in my lap. "Don't drop that," he said. "I had a hell of a time getting it back. They didn't want to give it to me. They wanted to keep it."

"What happened?"

"But I pitched a bitch," he went on. "I said, hey, you ain't gonna play the game, you can give back the bat and ball. They didn't like it but it was easier to give it to me than to put up with all the hell I was raising." He drained his glass and banged it down on the tabletop. "You can forget about Stettner. There's no case."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean there's no case. I talked to cops, I talked to an ADA. You got a whole batch of different things and they don't add up to dick."

"One thing you've got," I said, "is a visual record of two people committing murder."

"Yeah," he said. "Right. That's what I saw and that's what I can't get out of my fucking head and that's why I'm drinking bad whiskey in the worst shithole in town. But what does it really amount to? He's got a hood covers most of his face and she's got a fucking mask. Who are they? You say it's Bergen and Olga and I say you're probably right, but can you imagine putting the two of them in the dock and making a jury watch this and trying to make an identification on that basis? 'Bailiff, will you please remove the female defendant's dress so the jury can get a good look at her tits, see if they match the set in the movie?' Because the tits are all you really get a good look at."

"You get to see her mouth."

"Yeah, and there's generally something in it. Look, here's the point. Odds are you could never get the tape seen by a jury. Any defense attorney's gonna try and get it disallowed, and they most likely could, because it's inflammatory. I'll fucking well say it's inflammatory. It inflamed the shit out of me, it made me want to jail those two fuckers and weld the cell door shut."

"But a jury can't see it."

"Probably not, but before it gets that far they tell me you can't even get an indictment, because what have you got to present to a grand jury? First off, who was murdered?"

"A kid."

"A kid we don't know zip about. Maybe his name is Happy and maybe he comes from Texas or South Carolina or some state where they play a lot of high school football. Where's the body? Nobody knows. When did the alleged homicide take place? Nobody knows. Did he really get killed? Nobody knows."

"You saw it, Joe."

"I see stuff on TV and in the movies all the time. Special effects, they call it. They got these hero killers, Jason, Freddie, they're in one movie after another, wasting people left and right. I'll tell you, they make it look as good as Bergen and Olga."

"There were no special effects in what we saw. That was home video."

"I know that. I also know that the tape doesn't amount to evidentiary proof that a murder was committed, and that without the where and the when and some proof that somebody actually got killed, you got next to nothing to walk into a courtroom with."

"What about Leveque?"

"What about him?"

"His murder's a matter of record."

"So? There is nothing anywhere to link Arnold Leveque to either of the Stettners. The only tie is the unsupported testimony of Richard Thurman, who's conveniently dead himself and who told you this in a private conversation with no witnesses present, and it's all hearsay and almost certainly not allowable. And not even Thurman could connect the Stettners to the film. He said Leveque was trying to blackmail Stettner with a film, but he also said Stettner got that film and that was the end of it. You can be positive in your own mind that we're talking about the same film here, and you can work it out that Leveque was the cameraman and was there when the kid's blood went down the drain, but that's not proof. You couldn't even say it in court without some lawyer jumping straight down your throat."

"What about the other boy? Bobby, the younger one."

"Jesus," he said. "What have you got? You've got a sketch based on a look you got at him sitting next to Stettner at a boxing match. You got some kid somebody hunted up who says he recognizes the kid and his name's Bobby, but he doesn't know his last name or where he's from or what happened to him. You got somebody else who says Bobby used to be with a pimp who used to threaten kids that he'd send them out and they wouldn't come back."

"His name's Juke," I said. "He shouldn't be too hard to trace."

"He was a cinch, as a matter of fact. People complain a lot about the computer system but it makes some things easy. Juke is a guy named Walter Nicholson. A/k/a Juke, a/k/a Juke Box. First bit he did was for breaking into coin-operated vending machines, which is where the nickname came from. Arrested for statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and immoral solicitation. In other words a lot of pimping arrests, a whole profile of pimping kids. A class act."

"Can't you pick him up? He could tie Bobby to Stettner."

"You got to get him to talk, which would be hard without having something to hold over his head, which I don't see here. And then you'd have to get somebody to believe anything a scumbag like Juke might say. But you can't do any of that because the prick happens to be dead."

"Stettner got him."

"No, Stettner didn't get him. He-"

"The same as he got Thurman, to get rid of a witness before anybody could get to him. Dammit, if I'd come in right away, if I hadn't waited over the weekend-"

"Matt, Juke got killed a week ago. And Stettner didn't have anything to do with it and probably doesn't even know it happened. Juke and another of Nature's noblemen shot each other in a social club on Lenox Avenue. They were fighting over a ten-year-old girl. Must be some hot broad, got two grown men shooting each other over her, don't you think?"

I didn't say anything.

"Look," he said, "I fucking hate this. I got the word last night and I went in this morning and carried on, and they're right. They're wrong but they're right. And I waited until tonight to call you because I wasn't looking forward to this conversation, believe it or not. Much as I like your company under other circumstances." He poured more whiskey into his glass. I got a whiff of it, but it didn't make me want it. Nor was it the worst smell in Pete's All-American.

I said, "I think I understand, Joe. I knew it was thin with Thurman dead."

"With Thurman alive I think we probably would have had them. But once he's dead there's no case."

"But if you mount a full-scale investigation-"

"Jesus," he said, "don't you get it? There's no grounds for an investigation. There's no complaint to act on, there's no probable cause for a warrant, there's a whole lot of nothing is what there is. The man's not a criminal, for openers. Never been arrested. You say mob connections, but his name's not in any files, never came up in any RICO investigations. Man's clean as a whistle. Lives on Central Park South, makes a good living trading in foreign currencies-"

"That's money laundering."

"So you say, but can you prove it? He pays his taxes, he gives to charities, he's made substantial political contributions-"

"Oh?"

"Don't give me that. It's not any clout that makes it impossible to take him down. Nobody ordered us off it because the prick's untouchable, he's got a hook with somebody important. No such thing. But he's not some street kid you can push around and never hear about it. You gotta have something'll stand up in court, and you want to know what stands up in court? Let me just say two words. You wanna hear two words? Warren Madison."

"Oh."

"Yeah, 'Oh.' Warren Madison, terror of the Bronx. Deals dope, kills four other dealers we know for sure and is listed as probable for five others, and when they finally corner this wanted fugitive in his mother's apartment he shoots six cops before they get the cuffs on him. He shoots six cops!"

"I remember."

"And that cocksucker Gruliow defends him, and what does he do, what he always does, he puts the cops on trial. Spins out all this shit about how the Bronx cops were using Madison as a snitch, and they were giving him confiscated cocaine to sell, and then they tried to murder him to keep him from talking. Do you fucking believe it? Six police officers with bullets in 'em, not a single bullet in Warren fucking Madison, and that means it was all a police department plot to kill the fuck."

"The jury bought it."

"Fucking Bronx jury, they would have cut Hitler loose, sent him home in a cab. And that's with a piece of shit of a dope dealer that everybody knew was guilty. You imagine what you'd get bringing a shaky case against a solid citizen like Stettner? Look, Matt, do you see what I mean? Do you want me to go over it again?"

I saw, but we went over it anyway. Somewhere in the course of it the Ten High began to get the upper hand. His eyes lost their sharp focus and he started slurring his words. Pretty soon he began repeating himself, losing track of his own arguments.

"Let's get out of this dive," I said. "Are you hungry? Let's get something to eat, maybe some coffee."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Just that I wouldn't mind some food."

"Horseshit. Don't patronize me, you son of a bitch."

"I wasn't doing that."

"Fuck you weren't. That what they teach you at those meetings? How to be a pain in the ass when another man wants to have a quiet couple of drinks?"

"No."

"Just because you're some kind of candyass who can't handle it anymore doesn't mean God appointed you to sober up the rest of the fucking world."

"You're right."

"Sit down. Where you going? For Christ's sake sit down."

"I think I'll get on home now," I said.

"Matt? I'm sorry. I was out of line there, okay? I didn't mean anything by it."

"No problem."

He apologized again and I told him it was fine, and then the booze took him back in the other direction and he decided he didn't like the tone of what I'd said. "Hang on one second," I told him. "Stay right where you are, I'll be back in a minute." And I walked out of there and headed home.

He was drunk, with the better part of a bottle still sitting there in front of him. He had his service revolver on his hip and I thought I recognized his car parked at the curb alongside a fire hydrant. It was a dangerous combination, but God hadn't appointed me to sober up the rest of the fucking world, or to make sure everybody got home safe, either.