A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

  “Haven’t a clue. I couldn’t have told you what he looked like if I hadn’t seen a picture of him. That brought it all back. If you’ve got a picture of her—”

  I didn’t. I had thought of trying to work with Galindez on a sketch of the placard girl but her facial features were too imperfectly defined in my memory, and I wasn’t at all certain she was the same woman I’d seen in the movie.

  I let him look at the pictures of the two boys, but he hadn’t seen either of them before. “Nuts,” he said. “I was doing so well, and now my average is down to one in three. Do you want more coffee? I can make another pot.”

  That made a good exit cue, and I said I had to be getting home. “And thanks again,” I said. “I owe you a big one. Anything I can do, anytime at all—”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. He looked embarrassed. In a bad Cockney accent he said, “Just doin’ me duty, guvnor. Let a man get by wiv killin’ ‘is wife and there’s no tellin’ what narsty thing ‘e’ll do next.”

  I swear I meant to go home. But my feet had other ideas. They took me south instead of north, and west on Fiftieth to Tenth Avenue.

  Grogan’s was dark, but the steel gates were drawn only part of the way across the front and there was one light lit inside. I walked over to the entrance and peered through the glass. Mick saw me before I could knock. He opened up for me, locked the door once I was inside.

  “Good man,” he said. “I knew you’d be here.”

  “How could you? I didn’t know it myself.”

  “But I did. I told Burke to put on a pot of strong coffee, I was that sure you’d be by to drink it. Then I sent him home an hour ago, I sent them all home and sat down to wait for you. Will it be coffee then? Or will you have Coca-Cola, or soda water?”

  “Coffee’s fine. I’ll get it.”

  “You will not. Sit down.” A smile played lightly on his thin lips. “Ah, Jesus,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Chapter 13

  We sat at a table off to the side. I had a mug of strong black coffee and he had a bottle of the twelve-year-old Irish that is his regular drink. The bottle had a cork stopper, a rarity these days; stripped of its label it would make a pretty decent decanter. Mick was drinking his whiskey out of a small cut-glass tumbler that may have been Waterford. Whatever it was it stood a cut above the regular bar glassware, and like the whiskey it was reserved for his private use.

  “I was here the night before last,” I said.

  “Burke told me you came by.”

  “I watched an old movie and waited for you. Little Caesar, Edward G. Robinson. ‘Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?’ ”

  “You’d have had a long wait,” he said. “I worked that night.” He picked up his glass and held it to catch the light. “Tell me something, man. Do you always need money?”

  “I can’t go very far without it. I have to spend it and that means I have to earn it.”

  “But are you scratching for it all the fucking time?”

  I had to think about it. “No,” I said at length. “Not really. I don’t earn a lot, but I don’t seem to need much. My rent’s cheap, I don’t have a car, I don’t carry any insurance, and I’ve got no one to support except myself. I couldn’t last long without working, but some work always seems to come along before the money runs out.”

  “I always need money,” he said. “And I go out and get it, and I turn around and it’s gone. I don’t know where it goes.”

  “That’s what everyone says.”

  “I swear it melts away like snow in the sun. Of course you know Andy Buckley.”

  “The best dart player I ever saw.”

  “He’s a fair hand. A good lad, too.”

  “I like Andy.”

  “You’d have to like him. Did you know he still lives at home with his mother? God bless the Irish, what a strange fucking race of men we are.” He drank. “Andy doesn’t make a living throwing darts in a board, you know.”

  “I thought he might do more than that.”

  “Sometimes he’ll do something for me. He’s a grand driver, Andy is. He can drive anything. A car, a truck, anything you could ask him to drive. He could likely fly a plane if you gave him the keys.” The smile was there for an instant. “Or if you didn’t. If you misplaced the keys and needed someone to drive without them, Andy’s your man.”

  “I see.”

  “So he went off to drive a truck for me. The truck was full of men’s suits. Botany 500, a good line of clothing. The driver knew what he was supposed to do. Just let himself be tied up and take his time working himself loose and then tell how a couple of niggers jumped him. He was getting well paid for his troubles, you can be sure of that.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ah, ‘twas the wrong driver,” he said, disgusted. “Your man woke up with a bad head and called in sick, entirely forgetting he was to be hijacked that day, and Andy went to tie up the wrong man and had to knock him on the head to get the job done. And of course the fellow got loose as quick as he could, and of course he called the police at once and they spotted the truck and followed it. By the grace of God Andy saw he was being followed and so he didn’t drive to the warehouse, or there would have been more men than himself arrested. He parked the truck on the street and tried to walk away from it, hoping they’d wait for him to come back to it, but they outguessed him and took him right down, and the fucking driver came down and picked him out of a lineup.”

  “Where’s Andy now?”

  “Home in bed, I shouldn’t doubt. He was in earlier and said he had a touch of the flu.”

  “I think that’s what Elaine’s got.”

  “Has she? It’s a nasty thing. I sent him home. Get in bed with a hot whiskey, I told him, and ye’ll be a new man in the morning.”

  “He’s out on bail?”

  “My bondsman had him out in an hour, but now he’s been released altogether. Do you know a lawyer named Mark Rosenstein? A very soft-spoken Jewish lad, I’m forever asking him to speak up. Don’t ask how much money I handed him.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’ll tell you anyway. Fifty thousand dollars. I don’t know where it all went, I just put it into his hands and left it to him. Some went to the driver, and your man changed his story and swore it wasn’t Andy at all, it was someone else entirely, someone taller and thinner and darker and with a Russian accent, I shouldn’t wonder. Oh, he’s very good, Rosenstein is. He’d make no impression in court, you could never hear what he was saying, but you do better if you stay out of court entirely, wouldn’t you say?” He freshened his drink. “I wonder how much of the money stayed with the little Jew. What would you guess? Half?”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Ah, well. He earned it, didn’t he? You can’t let your men rot in prison cells.” He sighed. “But when you spend money like that you have to go out and get more.”

  “You mean they wouldn’t let Andy keep the suits?” I went on to tell him Joe Durkin’s story of Maurice, the dope dealer who’d demanded the return of his confiscated cocaine. Mick put his head back and laughed.

  “Ah, that’s grand,” he said. “I ought to tell that one to Rosenstein. ‘If you were any good at all,’ I’ll tell him, ‘ye’d have arranged it so that we got to keep the suits.’ “ He shook his head. “The fucking dope dealers,” he said. “Did you ever try any of that shit yourself, Matt? Cocaine, I mean.”

  “Never.”

  “I tried it once.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  He looked at me. “The hell I didn’t,” he said. “By God it was lovely! I was with a girl and she wouldn’t rest until I tried some. And then she got no rest at all, let me tell you. I never felt so fine in my life. I knew I was the grandest fellow that ever lived and I could take charge of the world and solve all its problems. But before I did that it might be nice to have a little more of the cocaine, don’t you know. And the next thing you knew it was the middle of the afternoon,
and the cocaine was all gone, and the girl and I had fucked our silly brains out, and she was rubbing up against me like a cat and telling me she knew where to get more.

  “ ‘Get your clothes on,’ I told her, ‘and buy yourself some more cocaine if you want it, but don’t bring it back here because I never want to see it again, or you either.’ She didn’t know what was wrong but she knew not to stay around to find out. And she took the money. They always take the money.”

  I thought of Durkin and the hundred dollars I’d given him. “I shouldn’t take this from you,” he’d said. But he hadn’t given it back.

  “I never touched cocaine again,” Mick said. “And do you know why? Because it was too fucking good. I don’t ever want to feel that good again.” He brandished the bottle. “This lets me feel as good as I need to feel. Anything more than that is unnatural. It’s worse than that, it’s fucking dangerous. I hate the stuff. I hate the rich bastards with their jade snuff bottles and gold spoons and silver straws. I hate the ones who smoke it on the streetcorners. My God, what it’s doing to the city. There was a cop on television tonight saying you should lock your doors when you’re riding in a taxi. Because when your cab stops for a light they’ll come in after you and rob you. Can you imagine?”

  “It keeps getting worse out there.”

  “It does,” he said. He took a drink and I watched him savor the whiskey in his mouth before he swallowed it. I knew what the JJ&S twelve-year-old tasted like. I used to drink it with Billie Keegan years ago when he tended bar for Jimmy. I could taste it now, but somehow the sense-memory didn’t make me crave a drink, nor did it make me fear the dormant thirst within me.

  A drink was the last thing I wanted on nights like this. I had tried to explain it to Jim Faber, who was understandably uncertain of the wisdom of my spending long nights in a saloon watching another man drink. The best I could do was to suggest that somehow Ballou was drinking for both of us, that the whiskey that went down his throat quenched my thirst as well as his own, and left me sober in the process.

  HE said, “I went to Queens again Sunday night.”

  “Not to Maspeth.”

  “No, not to Maspeth. Another part entirely. Jamaica Estates. Do you know it?”

  “I have a vague idea of where it is.”

  “You go out Grand Central Parkway and get off at Utopia. The house we were looking for was on a little street off Croydon Road. I couldn’t tell you what the neighborhood looked like. It was full dark when we went out there. Three of us, and Andy driving. He’s a grand driver, did I tell you?”

  “You told me.”

  “They were expecting us, but they didn’t expect we’d have guns in our hands. Spanish they were, from somewhere in South America. A man and his wife and the wife’s mother. They were dope dealers, they sold cocaine by the kilo.

  “We asked him where his money was. No money, he said. They had cocaine to sell, they didn’t have any cash. Now I knew they had money in the house. They’d had a big sale the day before and they still had some of the money around.”

  “How did you know?”

  “From the lad who gave me the address and told me how to get through the door. Well, I took the man in a bedroom and tried to talk sense to him. Talked with my hands, you might say. He stuck fast to his story, the little greaseball.

  “And then one of the lads comes in with a baby. ‘Get up off the money,’ he tells the man, ‘or I’ll cut the wee bastard’s throat.’ And the babe’s screaming through all this. No one’s hurting him, you understand, but he’s hungry or he wants his mother. You know how it is with babies.”

  “What happened?”

  “If you can believe this,” he said, “the father as much as says we can go to hell. ‘I don’t think you do thees,’ he says, looking me right in the eye.

  “ ‘You’re right,’ I told him. ‘I don’t kill babies.’ And I told my man to take the babe to its mother and have her change his diaper or give him a bottle, whatever would stop his crying.” He straightened up in his chair. “And then I took the father,” he said, “and I put him in a chair, and I left the room and came back wearing my father’s apron. One of the lads—Tom it was, you know Tom, behind the bar most afternoons.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tom had a gun to his head, and I had the big cleaver that was my father’s also. I went over and tried it out on the bedside table, just took a good whack at it and it collapsed into a pile of kindling. Then I took hold of his arm just above the wrist, pinning it to the arm of the chair, and with my other hand I raised up the cleaver.

  “ ‘Now, you spic bastard,’ I said, ‘where’s your money, or don’t you theenk I’ll take your fucking hand off?’ “ He smiled with satisfaction at the memory. “The money was in the laundry room, in the vent pipe for the dryer. You could have turned the house upside down and never found it. We were out of there in no time, and Andy had us safely home. I’d have been lost out there, but he knew all the turns.”

  I got up and went behind the bar to pour myself another cup of coffee. When I got back to the table Mick was gazing off to one side. I sat down and waited for the coffee to cool and we both let the silence stretch for a while.

  Then he said, “We left them alive, the whole household. I don’t know, that could have been a bad idea.”

  “They wouldn’t call the police.”

  “They couldn’t do that, and they weren’t well connected, so I didn’t think they’d come back at us. And we left the cocaine. There was ten kilos of it that we found, shaped like little footballs. ‘I’m leaving you your coca,’ I told him, ‘and I’m leaving you alive. But if you ever come back at me,’ I said, ‘then I’ll come back here. And I’ll wear this’—pointing to the apron—‘and I’ll carry this’—the cleaver—‘and I’ll lop off your hands and feet and whatever else I can think of.’ I’d do no such thing, of course. I’d just kill him and be done with it. But you can’t scare a drug dealer by telling him you’ll kill him. They all know somebody will kill them sooner or later. Tell them you’ll leave them with some pieces missing, though, and the picture sticks in their mind.”

  He filled his glass and took a drink. “I didn’t want to kill him,” he said, “because I’d have had to kill the wife too, and the old woman. I’d leave the baby because a baby can’t pick you out of a lineup, but what kind of a life would I be leaving it? It’s got a bad enough life already, with that for a father.

  “Because look how he called my bluff. ‘I don’t think you do thees.’ The bastard didn’t care if I did it. Go ahead, kill the baby, he can always start another one. But when it was a question of his hand winding up on the floor, why, he wasn’t so fucking tough then, was he?”

  A little later he said, “Sometimes you have to kill them. One runs for the door and you drop him, and then you have to take out all the rest of them. Or you know they’re not people who will let it go, and it’s kill them or watch your back for the rest of your life. What you do then is scatter the drugs all over the place. Grind the bricks to powder, pour it on the bodies, tread it into the rug. Let it look like dealers killing each other. The cops don’t break their necks to solve that kind of killing.”

  “Don’t you ever take the drugs along?”

  “I don’t,” he said, “and I’m giving up a fortune, and I just don’t care. There’s so much money in it. You wouldn’t have to deal in it, you could sell the lot to someone. It wouldn’t be hard to find someone who wanted to buy it.”

  “No, I don’t suppose it would.”

  “But I’ll have no part of it, and I won’t work with anyone who’ll use it or traffic in it. The cocaine I left behind the other night, I could have got more for it than I took in cash from the dryer vent. There was only eighty thousand there.” He lifted his glass, set it down again. “There should have been more. I know he had another stash somewhere in the fucking house, but I’d have had to chop off his hand to get it. And that would have meant killing him after, and killing the lot of them. And calling
the police later, telling them there was a baby crying in a house on such-and-such a street.”

  “Better to take the eighty thousand.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “But there’s four thousand right off the top for the lad who told us where to go and how to get in. A finder’s fee, you call it. Five percent, and I shouldn’t wonder he thought we got more and were cheating him. Four thousand for him, and a good night’s pay for Tom and Andy and the fourth fellow, whom you don’t know. And what’s left for myself is a little less than what I paid to get Andy off the hook for the hijacking.” He shook his head. “I always need money,” he said. “I don’t understand it.”

  I talked some about Richard Thurman and his dead wife, and about the man we’d seen at the fights in Maspeth. I took out the sketch and he looked at it. “It’s very like him,” he said. “And the man who drew it never saw the man he was drawing? You wouldn’t think it could be done.”

  I put the sketch away and he said, “Do you believe in hell?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Ah, you’re fortunate. I believe in it. I believe there’s a place reserved for me there, a chair by the fire.”

  “Do you really believe that, Mick?”

  “I don’t know about the fire, or little devils with fucking pitchforks. I believe there’s something for you after you die, and if you lead a bad life you’ve got a bad lot ahead of you. And I don’t lead the life of a saint.”

  “No.”

  “I kill people. I only do it out of need, but I lead a life that makes killing a requirement.” He looked hard at me. “And I don’t mind the killing,” he said. “There are times I have a taste for it. Can you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But to kill a wife for the insurance money, or to kill a child for pleasure.” He frowned. “Or taking a woman against her will. There’s more men than you’d think who’ll do that last. You’d think it was just the twisted ones but sometimes I think it’s half the human race. Half the male sex, anyway.”