A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

Chapter 6

I would have called Will first thing the next morning but I didn't know how to get hold of him. I knew deeply personal things about him, I knew he started drinking cough syrup at twelve, I knew his fiancé had broken up with him because he'd gotten into a drunken argument with her father, I knew his current marriage had hit a rocky stretch when he sobered up. But I didn't know the guy's last name or where he worked, so I had to wait until the eight-thirty meeting.

He got to St. Paul 's just after the meeting started, and on the break he made a beeline for me and wanted to know if I'd had a chance to see the film. "Sure," I said, "it's always been one of my favorites. I especially liked the part where Donald Sutherland impersonates a general and reviews the troops."

"Jesus," he said, "I specifically wanted you to watch that particular film, the cassette I gave you last night. Didn't I tell you?"

"Just a little joke," I said.

"Oh."

"I saw the thing. It wasn't my idea of a good time, but I saw it all the way through."

"And?"

"And what?"

I decided we could get along without the second half of the meeting. I took his arm and led him outside and up a flight of stairs to street level. Across Ninth Avenue a man and woman were arguing about money, their voices carrying far and wide on the warm air. I asked Will where the cassette had come from.

"You saw the label," he said. "The video-rental place around the corner from me. Sixty-first and Broadway."

"You rented it?"

"That's right. I've seen it before, Mimi and I have both seen it several times, but we caught one of the sequels on cable last week and we wanted to look at the real thing again. And you know what we saw."

"Right."

"A fucking snuff film. That's what they're called, isn't it?"

"I think so."

"I never saw one before."

"Neither did I."

"Really? I thought being a cop and a detective and all-"

"Never."

He sighed. "Well, what do we do now?"

"What do you mean, Will?"

"Do we go to the cops? I don't want to get in trouble but I wouldn't feel right just looking the other way, either. I guess what I'm saying is I want your advice on how to proceed."

They were still yelling at each other on the far side of the avenue. Leave me alone, the man kept saying. Leave me the fuck alone.

I said, "Let me get a clear picture of how you wound up with the film. You walked into the store, you picked it off the shelf-"

"You don't pick the actual cassette off the shelf."

"You don't?"

He explained the procedure, how they had a cardboard sleeve that they displayed, and you took that to the counter and exchanged it for the cassette that went with it. He had a membership there, so they checked the film out to him and collected the charge for an overnight rental, whatever it was. A couple of dollars.

"And this was at Broadway and Sixty-first?"

He nodded. "Two, three doors from the corner. Right next to Martin's Bar." I knew the bar, a big open room like a Blarney Stone, with low-priced drinks and hot food on a steam table. Years ago they'd had a sign in the window touting their Happy Hour, with drinks at half price from 8 to 10 A.M. That's got to be some Happy Hour at eight in the morning.

"How late are they open?"

"Eleven, I think. Midnight on weekends."

"I'll go talk to them," I said.

"Now?"

"Why not?"

"Well, I don't know. Do you want me to come with you?"

"There's no need."

"You're sure? Because in that case I think I'll go back for the rest of the meeting."

"You might as well."

He turned away, then back again. "Oh, Matt? I was supposed to bring the film back yesterday, so they may want to charge for an extra day. Whatever it comes to, just let me know and I'll reimburse you."

I told him that wasn't something he had to worry about.

THE video-rental store was where Will had told me it would be. I stopped at my room first and had the cassette with me when I walked in. There were four or five customers browsing, a man and a woman behind the counter. They were both in their thirties, and he had a two- or three-day growth of beard. I figured he was the manager. If she was in charge, she probably would have told him to go home and shave.

I walked over to him and said I wanted to speak to the manager. "I'm the owner," he said. "Will that do?"

I showed him the cassette. "I believe you rented this," I said.

"That's our label, so it must be one of ours. The Dirty Dozen, always a popular favorite. Something wrong with it? And are you sure it's the tape or has it been a while since you cleaned your heads?"

"A customer of yours checked this out two days ago."

"And you're returning it for him? If it was two days there'll be a late charge. Let me look it up." He went over to a computer terminal and keyed in a code number from the label. "William Haberman," he said. "According to this it was three days ago, not two, so that means he owes us four dollars and ninety cents."

I didn't reach for my wallet. I said, "Are you familiar with this particular tape? Not the film itself but the individual cassette?"

"Should I be?"

"There's another film recorded over half of it."

"Let me see that," he said. He took the cassette from me and pointed at one edge. "See right there? Your blank cassette has a tab there. You record something you want to save, you break the tab off and you can't record over it by mistake. A commercial cassette like this comes with a gap where the tab would be so you can't ruin it by accidentally hitting the Record button, which people would do all the time otherwise, geniuses that they are. But if you bridge the gap with a piece of Scotch tape, then you're back in business. You sure that's not what your friend did?"

"I'm very sure."

He looked suspicious for a moment, then shrugged. "So he wants another copy of Dozen, right? No problem, it's a popular title, we've got multiple copies. Not an even dozen, dirty or otherwise, but enough." He was on his way to get one when I stopped him with a hand on his arm.

"That's not the problem," I said.

"Oh?"

"Someone recorded a pornographic movie over the middle section of The Dirty Dozen," I said. "Not just the usual X-rated romp but an extremely violent and sadistic specimen of kiddie porn."

"You're kidding."

I shook my head. "I'd like to know how it got there," I said.

"Jesus, I'll bet you would," he said. He reached to touch the cassette, drew his hand away as if it were hot. "I swear I had nothing to do with it. We don't carry any X-rated stuff, no Deep Throat, no Devil in Miss Jones, none of that garbage. Most rental shops have a section or at least a few titles, you get married couples who want some visual foreplay, they're not the type to patronize the cesspools on Times Square. But when I opened up I decided I didn't want to have anything to do with that kind of material. I don't want it in my store." He looked down at the cassette but made no move to touch it. "So how did it get here? That's the big question, isn't it?"

"Someone probably wanted to make a copy of another tape."

"And he didn't have a blank cassette handy so he used this one instead. But why use a rental tape and then turn it in the next day? It doesn't make sense."

"Maybe someone made a mistake," I suggested. "Who was the last person to rent it?"

"Before Haberman, you mean. Let's see." He consulted the computer, frowned. "He was the first," he said.

"It was a brand-new tape?"

"No, of course not. Does it look like a new tape? I don't know, you get everything on computer and you can keep records like never before, and then it does something like this. Oh, wait a minute. I know where this tape came from."

A woman, he explained, had brought in a whole shopping bag full of videocassettes, most of them good solid classics. "There were all three versions of The Maltese Falcon, if you can believe that. One from 1936 called Satan Met a Lady, with Bette Davis and Warren Williams. Arthur Treacher plays Joel Cairo, and the Sidney Greenstreet role is played by a fat lady named Alison Skipworth, believe it or not. And then there's the original 1931 version, with Ricardo Cortez playing Spade as a real slimeball, nothing like the hero Bogart made him into in 1940. That was called The Maltese Falcon, but after they released the Huston version the first one was retitled. Dangerous Female, they called it."

The woman had said she was a landlady. A tenant of hers had died and she was selling off some of his things to recoup the back rent he owed.

"So I bought the lot," he said. "I don't know if he really owed back rent or she just saw a chance to pick up a couple of dollars, but I knew she wasn't a burglar, she hadn't gone and stolen the tapes. And they were in good condition, the ones I looked at." A rueful smile. "I didn't look at all of them. I certainly didn't look at this one."

"That would explain it," I said. "If he owned the tape, whoever he was-"

"And he had a tape to copy, and maybe it was the middle of the night so he couldn't go out and buy a blank cassette. Sure, that makes sense. He wouldn't record on a rental cassette, but this one didn't become a rental cassette until I bought it from her, and by then he had already dubbed something else onto it." He looked at me. "Really kiddie porn? You weren't exaggerating?"

I said I wasn't. He said something about the kind of world it was, and I asked the woman's name.

"No way I'd remember it," he said, "assuming I ever knew it in the first place, which I don't think I did."

"Didn't you write her a check?"

"Probably not. I think she wanted cash. People generally do. There's a chance I wrote out a check. Do you want me to see?"

"I'd appreciate it."

He took time out to wait on a customer, then went into a back room and emerged a few minutes later. "No check," he said. "I didn't think there would be. I found my memo of the transaction, which is amazing enough. She had thirty-one cassettes and I gave her seventy-five dollars. That sounds low, but these were used items, and it's the overhead that's everything in this business."

"Did you have her name on the transaction memo?"

"No. The date's June fourth, if that's any help. And I've never seen the woman before or since. I gather she lives in the neighborhood, but I don't know anything more about her than that."

He couldn't come up with anything else, and I couldn't think of any more questions to ask him. He said that Will had a one-night rental of The Dirty Dozen coming, an unimpaired copy, and at no charge.

When I got back to my hotel I looked up Will's number- it was easy now that I knew his last name. I called him and told him he could pick up his free movie whenever he wanted.

"As far as the other movie goes," I said, "there's nothing for either of us to do. Some guy copied a tape onto his own cassette of The Dirty Dozen and it wound up finding its way into circulation. The man whose tape it was is dead and there's no way of finding out who he was, let alone tracing the tape back from him. Anyway, items like that get passed around and around like that, with people interested in that sort of thing copying each other's tapes because that's the only way to get the stuff, it's not available on the open market."

"Thank God for that," he said. "But is it all right to just forget about it? A boy was killed."

"The original tape could be ten years old," I said. "It could have been shot in Brazil." Not likely, not with everybody speaking American English, but he let it pass. "It's a pretty horrible piece of tape, and my life would be every bit as rich and fulfilling if I'd never seen it, but I don't see that there's anything to be done about it. There are probably hundreds of similar tapes around the city. Dozens, anyway. The only thing special about this one is that you and I happened to see it."

"There's no point in taking it to the police?"

"None that I can see. They'd confiscate it, but then what? It would just go in a storeroom somewhere, and meanwhile you'd have to answer a lot of questions about how it happened to wind up in your hands."

"I don't want that."

"Of course not."

"Well," he said. "Then I guess we just forget about it."

EXCEPT that I couldn't.

What I had seen and the manner in which I had seen it made a fairly deep impression on me. I had been speaking the truth when I told Will I had never seen a snuff film. I heard rumors from time to time- that they'd confiscated one in Chinatown, for instance, and they'd set up a projector at the Fifth Precinct and screened it. The cop I heard it from said the cop who'd told him had left the room when the girl in the film had her hand cut off, and maybe it happened just that way, but cops' stories get improved with the telling the same as saloon stories about Paddy Farrelly's head. I knew there were films like that, and I knew there were people who would make them and others who would watch them, but the world they lived in had never before impinged upon my own.

And so there were things that stayed with me, and they were not what I might have expected. The boy's laconic air when the filming began- "Is that thing running? Am I supposed to say anything?" His surprise when the party got nasty, and his inability to believe what was happening.

The man's hand on the boy's forehead in the midst of it all, gentle, solicitous, smoothing the hair back. It was a gesture repeated intermittently through the proceedings, until the final cruelty was inflicted and the camera panned to a drain set in the floor a few yards from the boy's feet. We had seen the drain before but now the camera made a special point of seeking it out, a black metal grid set in a black-and-white checkerboard floor. Blood, red as the female performer's lipstick, red as her long fingernails and the tips of her little breasts, flowed across the squares of black and white, flowed into the drain.

That was the final shot, no people in it, just the floor tiles and the drain and the blood flowing. Then a white screen, and then Lee Marvin again, making the world safe for democracy.

For a few days, maybe as much as a week, I found myself thinking about what I had seen. I didn't do anything about it, though, because I couldn't think what to do. I had stashed the cassette in my safe-deposit box without looking at it a second time- once was enough- and, while it seemed like something I ought to hang on to, what was there to do with it? What it was, really, was a videotape in which two unidentifiable persons had sexual relations with one another and with a third person, also unidentified, whom they mistreated, presumably against his will, and almost certainly killed. There was no way to tell who they were or where and when they did what they did.

One day after a noon meeting I walked down Broadway to Forty-second Street, where I spent a couple of hours on the nasty stretch between Broadway and Eighth. I walked in and out of a lot of porno shops. I was self-conscious at first, but I got over it, and I took my time and browsed in the S-and-M sections. Each shop had some- bondage, discipline, torture, pain, each with a few sentences of description and a still photo on the outside to whet your appetite.

I didn't expect to see our version of The Dirty Dozen offered commercially. Censorship in the Times Square shops is minimal, but kiddie porn and murder are still prohibited, and what I'd seen was both of those. The boy might have been old enough to pass, and a good editor could conceivably have trimmed the worst of the violence, but it still seemed unlikely that I'd run across a soft version offered for sale.

There was a possibility, though, that Rubber Man and Leather Woman had made other films, separately or together. I didn't know if I would recognize them but I thought I might, especially if they appeared again in the same costumes. So that's what I was looking for, if indeed I was looking for anything.

On the uptown side of Forty-second Street, perhaps five doors east of Eighth Avenue, there was a hole-in-the-wall shop much like the others, except that it seemed to specialize in sadomasochistic material. It had all the other specialties as well, of course, but its S-and-M section was proportionately larger. There were videos ranging from $19.98 all the way up to $100, and there were photo magazines with names like Tit Torture.

I looked at all of the videocassettes, including the ones made in Japan and Germany and the aggressively amateurish ones with crude computer-printed labels. Before I was halfway through I had ceased really looking for Rubber Man and his heartless partner. I wasn't looking for anything. I was just letting myself soak up this world to which I'd been so abruptly introduced. It had always been here, less than a mile from where I lived, and I had always known of it, but I'd never let myself sink into it before. I'd never had reason to.

I got out of there, finally. I must have been in the shop for close to an hour, looking at everything, buying nothing. If this bothered the clerk he kept his annoyance to himself. He was a dark-skinned young man from the Indian subcontinent, and he kept his face expressionless and never said a word. In fact no one in the shop ever spoke, not he, not I, not any of the other customers. Everyone was careful to avoid eye contact, browsing, buying or not buying, and moving into and through and out of the store as if genuinely unaware of anyone else's presence. Now and then the door would open and close, now and then there'd be a jingly sound as the clerk counted out change into somebody's palm, quarters for the video booths at the back. Otherwise all was silence.

I took a shower as soon as I got back to my hotel. That helped, but I still carried the aura of Times Square around with me. I went to a meeting that night and took another shower and went to bed. In the morning I had a light breakfast and read the paper, and then I walked down Eighth Avenue and turned left on the Deuce.

The same clerk was on duty, but if he recognized me he kept it to himself. I bought ten dollars' worth of quarters and went into one of the little booths in back and locked the door. It doesn't matter which booth you select because each contains a video terminal hooked into a single sixteen-channel closed-circuit system. You can switch from channel to channel at will. It's like watching television at home, except the programming is different and a quarter buys you a scant thirty seconds of viewing time.

I stayed in there until my quarters were gone. I watched men and women do various things to one another, each some variation on an overall theme of punishment and pain. Some of the victims seemed to be enjoying the proceedings, and none looked to be in any real distress. They were performers, willing volunteers, troupers putting on a show.

Nothing that I saw was much like what I'd seen at Elaine's.

When I got out of there I was ten dollars poorer and felt about that many years older. It was hot and humid out, it had been like that all week, and I wiped sweat off my forehead and wondered what I was doing on Forty-second Street and why I'd come there. They didn't have anything I wanted.

But I couldn't seem to get off the block. I wasn't drawn to any other porno stores, nor did I want any of the services the street had to offer. I didn't want to buy drugs or hire a sexual partner. I didn't want to watch a kung fu movie or buy basketball sneakers or electronic equipment or a straw hat with a two-inch brim. I could have bought a switchblade knife ("Sold only in kit form; assembly may be illegal in some states") or some fake photo ID, printed while-U-wait, $5 black-and-white, $10 color. I could have played Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, or listened to a white-haired black man with a bullhorn who had absolute conclusive proof that Jesus Christ was a full-blooded Negro born in present-day Gabon.

I walked back and forth, back and forth. At one point I crossed Eighth and had a sandwich and a glass of milk at a stand-up lunch counter in the Port Authority bus terminal. I hung out there for a while- the air-conditioning was a blessing- and then something drove me back onto the street.

One of the theaters had a pair of John Wayne movies, The War Wagon and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. I paid a dollar or two, whatever it cost, and went inside. I sat through the second half of one film and the first half of the other and went outside again.

And walked some more.

I was lost in thought and not paying attention when a black kid stepped up next to me and asked me what I was doing. I turned to look at him and he stared up at me with a challenging look in his eyes. He was fifteen or sixteen or seventeen, around the same age as the boy murdered in the film, but he looked far more streetwise.

"I'm just looking in a store window," I said.

"You been lookin' in every window," he said. "You been up and down the block time and time again."

"So?"

"So what you lookin' for?"

"Nothing."

"Walk on down to the corner," he said. "Down to Eighth, and then around the corner and wait."

"Why?"

"Why? So all these people don't be lookin' at us, that's why."

I waited for him on Eighth Avenue, and he must have run around the block or taken a shortcut through the Carter Hotel. Years ago it was the Hotel Dixie, and it was famous for one thing- the switchboard operator answered every call, "Hotel Dixie, so what?" I think they changed the name about the same time that Jimmy Carter took the presidency away from Gerald Ford, but I could be wrong about that, and if it's true it's probably coincidence.

I was standing in a doorway when he approached, walking south from Forty-third Street, his hands in his pockets and his head cocked to one side. He was wearing a denim jacket over a T-shirt and jeans. You would have thought he'd be roasting in that jacket, but the heat didn't seem to bother him.

He said, "I seen you yesterday and I seen you all day today. Back an' forth, back an' forth. What you lookin' for, man?"

"Nothing."

"Shit. Everybody on the Deuce be lookin' for somethin'. First I thought you was a cop, but you ain't a cop."

"How do you know?"

"You ain't." He took a long look at me. "Are you? Maybe you are."

I laughed.

"What you laughin' at? You actin' strange, man. Man asks do you want to buy reefer, do you want to buy rock, you just give your head a quick little shake, you don't even look at the man. You want any kind of drugs?"

"No."

"No. You want a date with a girl?" I shook my head. "A boy? Boy and a girl? You want to see a show, you want to be a show? Tell me what you want."

"I just came here to walk around," I said. "I had some things to think about."

"Sheeeee," he said. "Come on down to the Deuce to think. Put on my thinkin' cap, come on down to the Street. You don't say what you really want, how you gonna get it?"

"I don't want anything."

"Tell me what you want, I help you get it."

"I told you, there's nothing I want."

"Well, shit, plenty of shit I want. Say you gimme a dollar."

There was no menace to him, no intimidation. I said, "Why should I give you a dollar?"

"Just 'cause you an' me be friends. Then maybe on account of we friends, I be givin' you a jay. How's that sound?"

"I don't smoke dope."

"You don't smoke dope? What do you smoke?"

"I don't smoke anything."

"Then gimme a dollar an' I won't give you nothin'."

I laughed in spite of myself. I glanced around and no one was paying attention to us. I got out my wallet and handed him a five.

"What's this for?"

" 'Cause we're friends."

"Yeah, but what do you want? You want me to go somewhere with you?"

"No."

"You just givin' me this here."

"No strings. If you don't want it-"

I reached for the bill and he snatched it away, laughing. "Hey now," he said. "You don't be givin' an' takin' back. Didn't your mama teach you better'n that?" He pocketed the bill, cocked his head and gave me a look. "I still ain't got you figured out," he said.

"There's nothing to figure," I said. "What's your name?"

"My name? Why you want to know my name?"

"No reason."

"You can call me TJ."

"All right."

" 'All right.' What's your name?"

"You can call me Booker."

"What you say, Booker?" He shook his head. "Shit, you some-thin', man. Booker. One thing you ain't, you ain't no Booker."

"My name's Matt."

"Matt," he said, trying it out. "Yeah, that's cool. Matt. Matt. An' that's where it's at, Matt."

" 'And that's the truth, Ruth.' "

His eyes lit up. "Hey," he said. "You hip to Spike Lee? You seen that movie?"

"Sure."

"I swear you hard to figure."

"There's nothing to figure."

"You got some kind of a jones. I just can't make out what it is."

"Maybe I haven't got one."

"On this street?" He whistled tonelessly. He had a round face, a button nose, bright eyes. I wondered if my five dollars would go for a vial of crack. He was a little chubby for a crack head and he didn't have the look they get, but then they don't get it right away.

"On the Deuce," he said, "everybody got a jones. They got a crack jones or a smack jones, a sex jones or a money jones, a speed-it-up or a slow-it-down jones. Man ain't got some kind of a jones, what he be doin' here?"

"And what about you, TJ?"

He laughed. "Oh, I got me a jones jones," he said. "I all the time got to be knowin' what kind of a jones the other dude's got, and that be my jones, an' that's where it's at, Matt."

I spent a few minutes more with TJ, and he was the best five-dollar cure I could have found for the Forty-second Street blues. By the time I headed back uptown I had shaken off the pall that had cloaked me all day. I had a shower and ate a decent dinner and went to a meeting.

The next day the phone rang while I was shaving, and I rode the subway to Brooklyn and got some work from a Court Street lawyer named Drew Kaplan. He had a client who was charged with vehicular homicide in a hit-and-run death.

"He swears he's innocent," Kaplan said, "and I personally happen to think he's full of shit, but on the chance that he's actually telling his attorney the truth, we ought to see if there's a witness somewhere who saw somebody else run over the old lady. You want to give it a go?"

I put in a week on it, and then Kaplan told me to let it go, that they'd offered to let his client plead to reckless endangerment and leaving the scene.

"And they'll drop the homicide charge," he said, "and I very strongly advised him to go for it, which he finally agreed to do once he got it into his head that this way he won't be serving any time. They're gonna ask for six months but I know the judge'll agree to probation, so I'll say yes to the deal tomorrow unless you just happened to find the perfect witness since I talked to you last."

"I found somebody just this afternoon."

"A priest," he said. "A priest with twenty-twenty vision who holds the Congressional Medal of Honor."

"Not quite, but a strong solid witness. The thing is, she's positive your guy did it."

"Jesus Christ," he said. "This is somebody the other side doesn't know about?"

"They didn't as of two hours ago."

"Well, let's for God's sake not tell them now," he said. "I'll close it out tomorrow. Your check, as they say, is in the mail. You're still a guy who doesn't have a license and doesn't submit reports, right?"

"Unless you need something for the record."

"As a matter of fact," he said, "what I need in this case is to not have something for the record, so you won't submit a report and I'll forget this conversation that we never had."

"Fine with me."

"Great. And Matt? Somewhere along the line you ought to think about getting yourself a ticket. I'd give you more work, but there's stuff I can't use you on unless you've got a license."

"I've been thinking about it."

"Well," he said, "if your status changes, let me know."

KAPLAN'S check was generous, and when it came I rented a car and drove up to the Berkshires with Elaine to spend some of it. When we got back Wally at Reliable called and I got two days' work in connection with an insurance claim.

The film I'd seen became part of the past, and my emotional connection to it faded. It had affected me because I had seen it, but in truth it had nothing to do with me or I with it, and as time passed and my life got back on its usual course, it became in my mind what it in fact was- i.e., one more outrage in a world that overflowed with them. I read the paper every morning, and every day there were fresh outrages to take the sting out of the old ones.

There were images from the film that still came to my mind now and then, but they no longer held the same charge for me. And I didn't get back to Forty-second Street, and I didn't run into TJ again, and scarcely thought of him. He was an interesting character, but New York is full of characters, they're all over the place.

The year went on. The Mets faded and finished out of the race, and the Yankees were never in it. Two California teams met in the Series, and the most interesting thing that happened during it was the San Francisco earthquake. In November the city got its first black mayor, and the following week Amanda Warriner Thurman was raped and murdered three flights above an Italian restaurant on West Fifty-second Street.

Then I saw a man's hand smooth a boy's light brown hair, and it all came back.