Out on the Cutting Edge

13

The phone woke me, wrenching me out of a dream. I sat up in bed, grabbed for the phone, got it to my ear. A voice, half in a whisper, said, “Scudder?”

“Who is this?”

“Forget about the girl.”

There’d been a girl in the dream but the dream was melting off like snow in the sun. I couldn’t bring her image into focus. I didn’t know where the dream ended and the phone call began. I said, “What girl? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Forget about Paula. You’ll never find her, you can’t bring her back.”

“From where? What happened to her?”

“Quit looking for her, quit showing her picture around. Drop the whole thing.”

“Who is this?”

The phone clicked in my ear. I said hello a couple of times, but it was useless. He was gone.

I switched on the bedside lamp, found my watch. It was a quarter to five. It had been past two by the time I turned the light out, so I’d had less than three hours. I sat on the edge of the bed and went over the conversation in my mind, trying to find a deeper message behind the words, trying to place the voice. I had the feeling I’d heard it before but couldn’t draw a bead on it.

I went into the bathroom and caught sight of my reflection in the mirror over the sink. All my years looked back at me, and I could feel their weight, pressing down on my shoulders. I ran the shower hot and stood under it for a long time, got out, toweled dry, got back into bed.

“You’ll never find her, you can’t bring her back.”

It was too late or too early, there was no one I could call. The only person I knew who might be awake was Mickey Ballou, and he’d be too drunk by now, and I didn’t have a number for him. And what would I say to him anyway?

“Forget about the girl.”

Was it Paula I’d been dreaming about? I closed my eyes and tried to picture her.

When I awoke a second time it was ten o’clock and the sun was shining. I was up and half-dressed before I remembered the phone call, and at first I wasn’t entirely certain if it had actually happened. My towel, tossed over a chair and still damp from my shower, provided physical evidence. I hadn’t dreamed it. Someone had called me, urging me off a case I had already pretty much dropped.

The phone rang again as I was tying my shoelace. I answered it and said a guarded “Hello,” and Willa said, “Matt?”

“Oh, hi,” I said.

“Did I wake you? You didn’t sound like yourself.”

“I was being cagey.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I woke up to an anonymous call in the middle of the night, telling me to stop looking for Paula Hoeldtke. When it rang just now I thought I might be in for more of the same.”

“It wasn’t me before.”

“I know that. It was a man.”

“Although I’ll admit I was thinking of you. I sort of thought I might see you last night.”

“I was tied up until late. I spent half the night at an AA meeting and the rest in a ginmill.”

“That’s a nice balanced existence.”

“Isn’t it? By the time I was done, it was too late to call.”

“Did you find out anything about what was bothering Eddie?”

“No. But all of a sudden the other case is alive again.”

“The other case? You mean Paula?”

“That’s right.”

“Just because someone told you to drop it? That’s given you a reason to pick it up again?”

“That’s just part of it.”

Durkin said, “Christ, Mickey Ballou. The Butcher Boy. How does he fit into it?”

“I don’t know. I spent a couple of hours with him last night.”

“Oh yeah? You’re really moving up in class these days, aren’t you? Wha’d you do, take him out to dinner, watch him eat with his hands?”

“We were at a place called Grogan’s.”

“A few blocks from here, right? I know the joint. It’s a dive. They say he owns it.”

“So I understand.”

“Except of course he can’t, since the SLA doesn’t like to let convicted felons put their names on liquor licenses, so somebody must be fronting it for him. What were the two of you doing, playing canasta?”

“Drinking and telling lies. He was drinking Irish whiskey.”

“You were drinking coffee.”

“Coke. They didn’t have coffee.”

“You’re lucky they had Coke, a pigpen like that. What the hell has he got to do with Pauline? Not Pauline, Paula. What’s he got to do with her?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, “but the machine went tilt when he saw her picture, and a couple of hours later somebody woke me up to tell me to drop the case.”

“Ballou?”

“No, it wasn’t his voice. I don’t know who it was. I have some ideas, but nothing solid. Tell me about Ballou, Joe.”

“Tell you what?”

“What do you know about him?”

“I know he’s an animal. I know he belongs in a fucking cage.”

“Then why isn’t he in one?”

“The worst ones never are. Nothing sticks to them. You can’t ever find a witness, or you find one and he gets amnesia. Or he disappears. It’s funny the way they disappear. You ever hear the story, Ballou’s running all over town showing people a guy’s head?”

“I know the story.”

“The head never turned up. Or the body. Gone, no forwarding. Finito.”

“How does he make his money?”

“Not running a ginmill. He started out doing some enforcing for some of the Italians. He’s as big as a house and he was always a tough bastard and he liked the work. All those Westies, tough Irish mugs from the Kitchen, they’ve been hiring out as muscle for generations. I suspect he was good at it, Ballou. Say you borrowed money from a shy and you’re a few weeks behind with the vig, and this hulk walks in on you wearing a bloody apron and swinging a cleaver in his hand. What are you going to do? You want to tell him see me next week or are you gonna come up with the cash?”

“You said he was a convicted felon. What did he go away for?”

“Assault. That was early, I don’t think he was out of his teens. I’m pretty sure he only went away the once. I could look it up.”

“It’s not important. Is that what he’s done ever since? Strongarm work?”

He leaned back. “I don’t think he hires out anymore,” he said. “You call him, tell him So-and-so needs his legs broken, I don’t think Ballou grabs a hunk of pipe and goes out and does the job himself. But he might send somebody. What else does he do? I think he’s got a few dollars on the street, earning that six-for-five. There’s joints he’s supposed to have a piece of, but you hear all sorts of shit along those lines, you never know what to believe. His name comes up in connection with a lot of things. Trucks getting hijacked, a couple of heavy heists. You remember a couple of years ago, five guys with masks and guns took off Wells Fargo for three mil?”

“They had somebody on the inside, didn’t they?”

“Yeah, but he happened to die before anybody had a chance to ask him the right questions. And his wife died, and he had a girlfriend on the side, and you’ll never guess what happened to her.”

“She died?”

“She disappeared. A few other people disappeared too, and a couple more turned up in car trunks out at JFK. We’d hear that this guy or that guy was one of the guns and masks on the Wells Fargo thing, and before we could go out looking for him we’d get a call that he was in the trunk of his Chevy Monte Carlo out at Kennedy.”

“And Ballou—”

“Was supposed to be the man at the top. That was the word, but nobody said it too loud because it was a dangerous thing to do, you could wind up in Long-Term Parking along with all your friends and relations. But that was the word, Ballou set it up and ran it, and he may have come out with the whole three mil because there wasn’t anybody around to share it with.”

“He have anything to do with drugs?”

“Not that I ever heard of.”

“Prostitution? White slaving?”

“Not his style.” He yawned, ran a hand through his hair. “There was another one they called Butcher. A mob guy, out in Brooklyn if I remember it right.”

“Dom the Butcher.”

“That’s the one.”

“Bensonhurst.”

“Yeah, right. Under Carlo G., if I remember it right. And they called him the Butcher because he had some kind of no-show job in the meatcutter’s union, that’s what he paid his taxes on. Dominic something or other, I forget his last name. Something Italian.”

“No kidding.”

“Somebody shot him a couple of years ago. His line of work, you call that dying of natural causes. The thing is, they called him the Butcher because of his cover job, but all the same he was a brutal bastard. There was a story, some kids robbed a church and he had ’em skinned alive.”

“To teach respect for the cloth.”

“Yeah, well, he must have been a deeply spiritual guy. All I’m getting at, Matt, is when you got a guy they call the Butcher, or the Butcher Boy, or whatever the fuck they call him, you’re talking about an animal oughta be in a cage, you’re talking about the kind of guy eats raw meat for breakfast.”

“I know.”

“What I’d do in your position,” he said, “is I’d take the biggest gun I could find, and right away I’d shoot him in the back of the neck. Either that or I’d stay the fuck away from him.”

The Mets were back home for a weekend series with the Pirates. They’d won last night and it didn’t look as though anyone was going to catch them. I called Willa but she had chores to do and wasn’t enough of a fan to shirk them. Jim Faber was at his shop, with a job he’d promised a client by six. I flipped through my book and called a couple of other fellows I knew from St. Paul’s, but either they weren’t home or they didn’t feel like shlepping out to Shea.

I could just stay home. The game would be televised, NBC was carrying it as the game of the week. But I didn’t want to sit around all day. I had things to do and I couldn’t do them. Some of them had to wait until dark, and some until after the weekend, and I wanted to get up and go somewhere in the meantime, not sit around looking at my watch. I tried to think who to go to the game with, and I could only come up with two people.

First was Ballou, and I had to laugh at myself for thinking of him. I didn’t have a number for him, and wouldn’t have called it if I had. He probably didn’t like baseball. Even if he did, I somehow couldn’t see the two of us palling around, eating hot dogs and booing a bad call at first base. It just showed how strong if illusory the bond between us had been the previous evening for me to have thought of him at all.

The other person was Jan Keane. I didn’t have to look up her number, and I dialed it and let it ring twice, then rang off before either she or her machine could answer.

I rode the subway down to Times Square, switched to the Flushing line and rode all the way out to Shea. The cashiers were sold out, but there were plenty of kids out front with tickets to sell, and I got a decent seat, up high behind third base. Ojeda pitched a three-hit shutout and for a change the team got him some runs, and the weather was just the way it ought to be. The new kid, Jefferies, went four-for-five with a double and a home run, and he went to his left for a low liner off Van Slyke’s bat and saved Ojeda’s shutout for him.

The fellow on my right said he’d seen Willie Mays in his rookie season at the Polo Grounds, and he’d been exciting in the same way. He’d come by himself, too, and he had a lot to say over nine innings, but it was better than sitting home and listening to Scully and Garagiola and Bud Light commercials. The fellow on my left had a beer each inning until they stopped selling it in the seventh. He had an extra in the fourth, too, to make up for the half of one that he spilled on his shoes and mine. I was annoyed at having to sit there and smell it, and then I reminded myself that I had a lady friend who generally smelled of beer when she didn’t smell of scotch, and that I’d spent the previous night voluntarily breathing stale beer fumes in a lowlife saloon and had a grand time of it. So I had no real reason to sulk if my neighbor wanted to sink a few while he watched the home team win one.

I had a couple of hot dogs myself, and drank a root beer, and stood up for the national anthem and the seventh-inning stretch, and to give Ojeda a hand when he got the last Pirate to swing at a curveball low and away. “They’ll roll right over the Dodgers in the playoffs,” my new friend assured me. “But I don’t know about Oakland.”

I’d made a dinner date with Willa earlier. I stopped at my hotel to shave and put on a suit, then went over to her place. She had her hair braided again, and the braid coiled across her forehead like a tiara. I told her how nice it looked.

She still had the flowers on the kitchen table. They were past their prime, and some were losing their petals. I mentioned this, and she said she wanted to keep them another day. “It seems cruel to throw them out,” she said.

She tasted of booze when I kissed her, and she had a small scotch while we decided where to go. We both wanted meat, so I suggested the Slate, a steak house on Tenth Avenue that always drew a lot of cops from Midtown North and John Jay College.

We walked over there and got a table in front near the bar. I didn’t see anyone I recognized, but several faces were vaguely familiar and almost every man in the room looked to be on the job. If anyone had been fool enough to hold the place up, he’d have been surrounded by men with drawn revolvers, a fair percentage of them half in the bag.

I mentioned this to Willa, and she tried to calculate our chances of being gunned down in crossfire. “A few years ago,” she said, “I wouldn’t have been able to sit still in a place like this.”

“For fear of being caught in a crossfire?”

“For fear they’d be shooting at me on purpose. It’s still hard for me to believe I’m dating a guy who used to be a cop.”

“Did you have a lot of trouble with cops?”

“Well, I lost two teeth,” she said, and fingered the two upper incisors that replaced the ones knocked out in Chicago. “And we were always getting hassled. We were presumably undercover, but we always figured the FBI had somebody in the organization reporting to them, and I can’t tell you the number of times the Feebies showed up to question me. Or to have long sessions with the neighbors.”

“That must have been a hell of a way to live.”

“It was crazy. But it almost killed me to leave.”

“They wouldn’t let you go?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. But the PCP gave my life all the meaning it had for a whole lot of years, and when I left it was like admitting all those years were a waste. And on top of that I would find myself doubting my actions. I would think that the PCP was right, and that I was just copping out, and missing my chance to make a difference in the world. That was what kept you sucked in, you know. The chance it gave you to see yourself as being one of the ones who mattered, out there on the cutting edge of history.”

We took our time over dinner. She had a sirloin and a baked potato. I ordered the mixed grill, and we split a Caesar salad. She started off with a scotch, then drank red wine with her dinner. I got a cup of coffee right away and let them keep filling it up for me. She wanted a pony of Armagnac with her coffee. The waitress came back and said the bartender didn’t have any, so she settled for a cognac. It couldn’t have been too bad, because she drank it and ordered a second one.

The check came to a fairly impressive sum. She wanted to split it and I didn’t work too hard trying to talk her out of it. “Actually,” she said, checking the waitress’s arithmetic, “I should be paying about two-thirds of this. More than that. I had a million drinks and you had a cup of coffee.”

“Cut it out.”

“And my entrée was more than yours.”

I told her to stop it, and we halved the check and the tip. Outside, she wanted to walk a little to clear her head. It was a little late for panhandlers, but some of them were still hard at it. I passed out a few dollars. The wild-eyed woman in the shawl got one of them. She had her baby in her arms, but I didn’t see her other child, and I tried not to wonder where it had gone to.

We walked downtown a few blocks and I asked Willa if she’d mind stopping at Paris Green. She looked at me, amused. “For a guy who doesn’t drink,” she said, “you sure do a lot of barhopping.”

“Somebody I want to talk to.”

We cut across to Ninth, walked down to Paris Green and took seats at the bar. My friend with the bird’s-nest beard wasn’t working, and the fellow on duty was no one I’d seen before. He was very young, with a lot of curly hair and a sort of vague and unfocused look about him. He didn’t know how I could get hold of the other bartender. I went over and talked to the manager, describing the bartender I was looking for.

“That’s Gary,” he said. “He’s not working tonight. Come around tomorrow, I think he’s working tomorrow.”

I asked if he had a number for him. He said he couldn’t give that out. I asked if he’d call Gary for me and see if he’d be willing to take the call.

“I really don’t have time for that,” he said. “I’m trying to run a restaurant here.”

If I still carried a badge he’d have given me the number with no argument. If I’d been Mickey Ballou I’d have come back with a couple of friends and let him watch while we threw all his chairs and tables out into the street. There was another way, I could give him five or ten dollars for his time, but somehow that went against the grain.

I said, “Make the phone call.”

“I just told you—”

“I know what you told me. Either make the phone call for me or give me the fucking number.”

I don’t know what the hell I could have done if he’d refused, but something in my voice or face must have gotten through to him. He said, “Just a moment,” and disappeared into the back. I went and stood next to Willa, who was working on a brandy. She wanted to know if everything was all right. I told her everything was fine.

When the manager reappeared I walked over to meet him. “There’s no answer,” he said. “Here’s the number, if you don’t believe me you can try it yourself.”

I took the slip of paper he handed me. I said, “Why shouldn’t I believe you? Of course I believe you.”

He looked at me, his eyes wary.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was out of line there, and I apologize. It’s been a rough couple of days.”

He wavered, then went with the flow. “Hey, that’s cool,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“This city,” I said, as if that explained everything, and he nodded, as if indeed it did.

He wound up buying us a drink. We had survived a tense moment together, and that seemed to carry more weight than the fact that we had created the tension ourselves. I didn’t really want another Perrier, but Willa managed to find room for another brandy.

When we stepped outside, the fresh air sucker-punched her and almost knocked her down. She grabbed my arm, caught her balance. “I can feel that last brandy,” she announced.

“No kidding.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

She drew away from me, her nostrils flaring, her face dark. “I’m quite all right,” she said. “I can get home under my own power.”

“Take it easy, Willa.”

“Don’t tell me to take it easy. Mr. Holier-than-thou. Mr. Soberer-than-thou.”

She stalked off down the street. I walked alongside her and didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Forget it.”

“You’re not mad?”

“No, of course not.”

She didn’t say much the rest of the way home. When we got into her apartment she swept up the faded flowers from the kitchen table and started dancing around the floor with them. She was humming something but I couldn’t recognize the tune. After a few turns she stopped and began to cry. I took the flowers from her and put them on the table. I held her and she sobbed. When the tears stopped I let go of her and she stepped back. She began undressing, dropping her clothes on the floor as she removed them. She took off everything and walked straight back to the bedroom and got into the bed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“Stay with me.”

I stayed until I was sure she was sleeping soundly. Then I let myself out and went home.