A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

  “I thought the burglars took his wallet.”

  “Yeah, right. His watch and his wallet. They left it on the first floor on their way out of the building, just dropped it at the foot of the stairs. Stripped the cash but left the credit cards.”

  “He could have run down himself and left it there.”

  “Or stood at the stairs and dropped it over the railing. Saved himself running up and down.”

  “And the jewelry they supposedly took from his wife—”

  “He could have put right back in her jewelry box. And his Rolex, well, who knows? Maybe he wasn’t wearing it in the first place. Maybe he rolled it up in a sock.”

  I said, “Then what? He beats himself up, ties his hands behind his back, tapes his mouth—”

  “I think if I was doing it I might tape my mouth before I tied my hands behind my back.”

  “You’re a better planner than I am, Joe. How was he tied? Did you see him when he was still tied up?”

  “No, dammit,” he said, “and that’s the one thing that never stops bothering me. I wanted to chew the hell out of the two uniforms who cut him loose, but what could you expect them to do? Here’s a guy, respectable-looking man, nicely dressed, he’s all tied up and hysterical on the floor and his wife’s lying there dead, and how are you gonna tell him he has to stay that way until a detective gets to the scene? Of course they cut him loose. I’d have done the same thing in their position, and so would you.”

  “Sure.”

  “But I fucking well wish they hadn’t. I wish I’d had a look at him first. Still sticking with your scenario, that he pulled it all off on his own, your question is could he have tied himself up. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “His legs were tied. It’s not hard to do that yourself. His hands were tied behind his back, and you would think that would be impossible, but it’s not, not necessarily.” He opened a drawer, rooted around, and came up with a set of cuffs. “Put your hands out, Matt.” He fastened the cuffs around my wrists. “Now,” he said, “bend forward and get one leg at a time through there. Sit on the edge of the desk. Go ahead, you can do it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You see this on television all the time, a guy’s cuffed, hands behind his back, and he sort of jumps through the circle of his own arms and he’s still cuffed but his hands are in front of him. Okay, now stand up and work your hands up behind your back.”

  “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  “Well, it would help if you were a little skinnier. Thurman’s got maybe a thirty-inch waist and no ass at all.”

  “Has he got long arms? It’d be easier if my arms were a few inches longer.”

  “I didn’t check his sleeve length. That’d be a good place for you to start your investigation, now that I think of it. Go to all the Chinese laundries in the neighborhood, see if you can find out his shirt size.”

  “Open the cuffs, will you?”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” he said. “I kind of like the effect, the way you’re sort of grabbing your own ass, can’t stand up straight and can’t sit down. I hate to interfere.”

  “Come on.”

  “I was sure I had a key somewhere. Hey, no problem, we can just ankle on down to the front desk, somebody must have a key. Oh, all right.” He produced a key, unlocked the handcuffs. I straightened up. My shoulder was sore, and I had pulled a muscle slightly in one thigh. “I don’t know,” he said. “They make it look a lot easier on television.”

  “No kidding.”

  “The thing is,” he said, “without seeing how he was tied, I don’t know what kind of a job they did of immobilizing him, or if it was something he could have done himself. I’m gonna drop your scenario and assume that there were burglars and they tied him up. You know what bothers me?”

  “What?”

  “He was still tied when the cops got there. He rolled off the bed, he knocked a table over, he made a telephone call—”

  “With a pipe tool clamped firmly between his teeth.”

  “Yeah, right. He did all that, and he even worked the tape most of the way off his mouth, which I guess you could do.”

  “I would think so.”

  “You want me to get a roll of tape and we’ll see if you can do it? Just a little joke, Matt. You know what your problem is? You got no sense of humor.”

  “I was wondering what my problem was.”

  “Well, now you know. Seriously, he does all the other stuff but he doesn’t work his hands loose. Now sometimes you can’t unless you’re Houdini. If you’ve got no mobility and there’s no give in the bonds, there’s not much you can do. But he was able to move around, and how good a job could these guys have done on him, given that they were pretty amateurish when it came to burglary? I wish I’d seen how he was tied, because my hunch is that he probably could have worked his way free, but that he chose not to try. And why would he make that choice?”

  “Because he wanted to be tied up when the cops got there.”

  “Exactly, because that alibied him for the murder. If he gets loose we can say he could have killed her, he wasn’t really tied up in the first place. But now, the way things stand, what we can say is he stayed tied up because he wanted to be found that way. It doesn’t prove anything because if you look at it that way he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, but as far as his motivation—”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “So I wish I’d seen him before they cut him loose.”

  “So do I. How was he tied?”

  “I just said—”

  “I mean what did they use? Cord, clothesline, what?”

  “Oh, right. They used a kind of household twine, pretty strong stuff, like you’d use to wrap a package. Or to tie up your girlfriend, if you happened to be into that kind of thing. Did they bring it with them? I don’t know. The Gottschalks had a drawer in the kitchen with pliers and screwdrivers and the usual odds and ends of household hardware. The old man couldn’t say whether they might have had a ball of twine in there or not. Who remembers that sort of thing, especially when you’re seventy-eight years old and you live half the year in one place and the rest of the time somewhere else? The burglars dumped that drawer, so if there was twine in it they would have seen it.”

  “What about the tape?”

  “Ordinary adhesive tape, white, kind you’d find in your medicine chest.”

  “Not in mine,” I said. “In mine you’d find a bottle of Rexall aspirin and a thing of dental floss.”

  “Well, the kind you’d find in your medicine chest if you happened to live like a human being. Gottschalk said he thought they had adhesive tape, and there wasn’t any in the bathroom. They didn’t leave the roll behind, or the twine either.”

  “I wonder why not.”

  “I don’t know. String savers, I guess. They took the pry bar, too. If I just left a woman dead in an apartment, I don’t think I’d want to walk down the street carrying burglar’s tools, but if they were geniuses—”

  “They’d be in some other line of work.”

  “Right. Why take the stuff? If Thurman was in on it, and if he was the one who bought the stuff, maybe they were afraid it could be traced. If they used what they found in the apartment . . . I don’t know, Matt, the whole thing’s so fucking speculative, you know?”

  “I know. You bat around the whys and what ifs, though, and sometimes something shakes loose.”

  “Which is why we’re batting them around.”

  “Did he describe the burglars?”

  “Oh, sure. A little hazy on the details, but consistent from one interrogation to another. He didn’t contradict himself enough to amount to anything. The descriptions are in the files, you’ll see them for yourself. What they were, they were two big white guys about the same age as Thurman and his wife. They both had mustaches, and the bigger one had his hair long in the back, the way some of them wear it, with like a little tail growing down there?”

  “I
know how you mean.”

  “A really classy style, marks you right away as a member of the upper crust. Like the spades with those high flattops, looks like they got a fez stuck on their heads, like they trim it with hedge clippers. Class all the way. What was I saying?”

  “The two burglars.”

  “Yeah, right. He went through the books of mug shots, very cooperative, very eager, but he didn’t spot them. I sat him down with a police artist. I think you know him. Ray Galindez?”

  “Sure.”

  “He’s good, but his sketches always come out looking Hispanic to me. There’s copies in the file. I think one of the papers ran them.”

  “I must have missed it.”

  “I think it was Newsday. We got a couple calls and wasted a little time checking them out. Nothing. You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think he did it all by himself.”

  “No, neither do I.”

  “I mean you can’t positively rule it out, because he could have found a way to tie himself up, and he could have managed to lose the pry bar and the tape and the twine. But I don’t think that’s what happened. I think he had help.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “He makes arrangements with a couple of skells, says here’s a key to the front door, make it easy on yourselves, walk on in and go up three flights and bust into the fourth-floor apartment. Not to worry, there’s nobody home, there won’t be anybody home upstairs either. Make yourselves at home, dump the drawers, throw the books on the floor, and help yourselves to all the cash and jewelry you can find. Just so you’re ready to go at twelve-thirty or one, whatever time we get home from the party.”

  “And they walk home because he doesn’t want to get there too early.”

  “Maybe, or maybe they just walk home because it’s a nice night. Who knows? They get to the Gottschalks’ floor and she says, ‘Oh, look, Ruth and Alfred’s door is open,’ and he shoves her through it and they grab her and knock her out and fuck her and kill her. Then he says, ‘Hey, asshole, you don’t want to walk down the street middle of the night carrying a television set, you can buy ten TVs with what I’m paying you for this.’ So they leave the set, but they take the twine and tape and pry bar because maybe they can be traced. No, that’s bullshit, how do you trace drugstore and hardware store shit like that?”

  “They take the stuff because that way we’ll know he couldn’t have done it himself, because how could the twine and tape walk out of there under their own power?”

  “Right, okay. But first before they take anything out of there they knock him around a little, and they do some fairly impressive superficial damage, you’ll see photos we took of him in the file. Then they tie him up and tape him up, his mouth, and maybe they rip it halfway off for him so he’ll be able to make the call when it’s time.”

  “Or maybe they’ve got him tied loosely enough that he can get a hand free and do what he has to do and then slip it back under the twine.”

  “I was coming to that. Jesus, don’t I wish those blues had been a little slower to cut him loose.”

  I said, “Anyway, they clear out and he waits as long as he can and then calls 911.”

  “Right. I don’t see any holes in that.”

  “No.”

  “I mean, show me some other way it makes sense that he’s alive. They just killed her, she’s lying there dead, so why would they tie him up when it’s so much easier to kill him?”

  “They already tied him up and taped his mouth before they did her.”

  “Oh, right, that’s his story. Even so, why leave him alive? He can ID the both of them all day long, and they’re already going to hang for doing her—”

  “Not in this state.”

  “Don’t remind me, will you? Point is they’re already down for Murder Two for doing her, they don’t make it any worse for themselves by doing him while they’re at it. They got the pry bar, all they gotta do is hit him a lick upside the head, as our little brown brothers would say.”

  “Maybe they did.”

  “Did what?”

  “Hit him hard enough so that they thought he was dead. Remember, they just killed her, and maybe they didn’t plan on it, so—”

  “You mean if he’s telling the truth.”

  “Right, playing devil’s advocate for a minute. They killed her unintentionally—”

  “Just happened to get her panty hose accidentally wrapped around her throat—”

  “—and they don’t exactly panic, but they’re in a hurry, they hit him a shot and he’s unconscious and they think he’s probably dead, that hard a shot with a steel bar ought to kill a man, and all they want to do is get the fuck out, they don’t want to take his pulse, see if he’s got enough breath left to fog a mirror.”

  “Shit.”

  “You see what I mean.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, I see what you mean. That’s why it’s an open file. The evidence is inconclusive and the facts we’ve got’ll support any theory you want.” He stood up. “I want some coffee,” he said. “Can I get you some?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  * * *

  “I don’t know why the coffee’s so bad,” he said. “I really don’t. We used to have this machine, you know, coin-operated, and you can never get a halfway decent cup of coffee out of one of them. But we chipped in and bought one of these electric drip pots, and we use premium coffee, and it comes out tasting like this. I think there must be some law of nature, you’re in a station house, the coffee has to taste like shit.”

  It didn’t taste that bad to me. He said, “If we ever clear this one, you know how it’ll happen.”

  “A snitch.”

  “A snitch hears something and passes it on, or one of the geniuses steps on his cock and we pick him up for something heavy, and he tries to do himself some good by ratting out his partner. And Thurman, assuming we’re right and it was his game.”

  “Or even if it wasn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I said, “ ‘She was alive and kicking when we left there, man. We put the pork to her but I swear she liked that part of it, an’ we sure didn’t wrap no stockings around her neck. Musta been her husband, decided to get hisself an instant divorce.’ ”

  “Jesus, that’s just how they’d say it.”

  “I know. That’s what they’d say if Thurman was a hundred percent innocent. ‘Wasn’t me killed her, she was alive when I left.’ And it could even be true.”

  “Huh?”

  “Say it was a crime of opportunity. The Thurmans come home, walk in on a robbery in progress. The skells rob them and beat him up and rape her because they’re animals, so why not act like it? Then they leave, and Thurman gets a hand free, and his wife’s unconscious and he thinks she’s dead—”

  “But she’s not dead, but it gives him an idea—”

  “—and her panty hose is right there on the bed next to her, and next thing you know it’s around her neck and this time she really is dead.”

  He thought about it. “Sure,” he said. “Could be. The medical examiner set the time of death at around one o’clock, which squares with Thurman’s story, but if he did her right after they left and then stalled a while, the time he was supposed to be unconscious and then struggling to free himself, well, that would all fit.”

  “Right.”

  “And nobody could implicate him. They could say she was alive when they left, but that’s something they’d say anyway.” He finished his coffee and threw the Styrofoam cup at the wastebasket. “Fuck this,” he said. “You can go around and around. I think he did it. Whether he planned it or it fell in his lap, I think he did it. All that money.”

  “She inherited better than half a million, according to the brother.”

  He nodded. “Plus the insurance.”

  “He didn’t say anything about insurance.”

  “It’s possible nobody told him. They took out policies payable to e
ach other shortly after they were married. Hundred-thousand-dollar straight life, double indemnity for accidental death.”

  “Well, that sweetens it a little,” I said. “Raises the ante by two hundred kay.”

  He shook his head.

  “Am I figuring wrong?”

  “Uh-huh. She got pregnant in September. Soon as they found out, he got in touch with his insurance agent and raised the amount of their coverage. A baby coming, increased responsibilities. Makes sense, right?”

  “What did he raise it to?”

  “A million on his own life. After all, he’s the breadwinner, his income’s gonna be tough to replace. Still, her role’s important, so he boosted her coverage to a half mil.”

  “So her death—”

  “Meant an even million in insurance, because they still had the double-indemnity clause, plus all of her property that he’ll inherit. Round it off, call it a total of a million and a half.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Yeah, right. He’s got means and motive and opportunity, and he’s a heartless little fuck if I ever saw one, and I couldn’t find a shred of evidence to show that he’s guilty of a single fucking thing.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then looked up at me. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you use the dental floss?”

  “Huh?”

  “Aspirin and dental floss, you said that’s all you’ve got in your medicine chest. Do you ever use it?”

  “Oh,” I said. “When I remember. My dentist nagged me into buying it.”

  “Same here, but I never use it.”

  “Neither do I, really. The good news is we’ll never run out.”

  “That’s it,” he said. “We got a fucking lifetime supply.”

  Chapter 4

  That evening I met Elaine Mardell in front of a theater on Forty-second Street west of Ninth Avenue. She was wearing tight jeans and square-toed boots and a black leather motorcycle jacket with zippered pockets. I told her she looked great.