A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

  “What girl? You didn’t mention a girl. You mean his partner in crime, the one with the little tits?”

  “I think she was the placard girl. Strutting around the ring between rounds with a sign telling what round was coming up.”

  “I don’t suppose she was wearing her leather drag.”

  I shook my head. “She was dressed for the beach, showing a lot of leg. I didn’t pay much attention to her.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “I mean it. There was something faintly familiar about her but I didn’t study her face.”

  “Of course not. You were too busy looking at her ass.” She put a hand on my arm. “I’d love to hear more,” she said.

  “But you’re expecting company. I’ll clear out. Do you mind if I leave the tape? I don’t want to carry it around all day or make a special trip to get rid of it.”

  “No problem. And I hate to rush you, but—”

  I gave her a kiss and left.

  WHEN I got out to the street I had the urge to plant myself in a doorway and see who showed up. She hadn’t come right out and said that her appointment was with a john, but neither had she said otherwise, and I had been careful not to ask. Nor did I really want to lurk in the shadows trying to spot her lunch date, and speculating just what he would have her do to earn the price of all those translations from the Spanish and Portuguese.

  Sometimes it bothered me. Sometimes it didn’t, and sometimes I thought that it ought to bother me more or less than it did. Someday, I thought, not for the first time, I would have to get it all sorted out.

  In the meantime I walked over to Madison and took a bus thirty blocks uptown. Chance’s gallery was one flight up over a shop that sold expensive clothing for children. The window featured a charming scene from Wind in the Willows, with the animals wearing the shop’s fashions. Rat wore a moss-green jumper that probably cost as much as a whole shelf full of contemporary Latin American fiction.

  The brass plate downstairs read, L. CHANCE COULTER/AFRICANA. I climbed a flight of carpeted stairs. The gilt-edged black lettering on the door bore the same legend, along with BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. I didn’t have an appointment, but maybe I wouldn’t need one. I rang, and after a moment the door was opened by Kid Bascomb. He was wearing a three-piece suit, and he smiled broadly when he saw who it was.

  “Mr. Scudder!” he said. “It’s good to see you. Is Mr. Coulter expecting you?”

  “Not unless he has a crystal ball. I took a chance he’d be in.”

  “He’ll be glad to see you. He’s on the telephone but come right in, Mr. Scudder, and make yourself comfortable. I’ll just tell him you’re here.”

  I made my way around the room, looking at the masks and statues. I didn’t know the field, but you didn’t need much expertise to sense the quality of the pieces on display. I was standing in front of what the label identified as a Senufo mask from the Ivory Coast when the Kid returned to tell me that Chance would be with me in a minute. “He’s on the phone with a gentleman in Antwerp,” he said. “I believe that’s in Belgium.”

  “I believe you’re right. I didn’t know you were working here, Kid.”

  “Oh, for some time now, Mr. Scudder.” Last night in Maspeth I’d told him to call me Matt, but it was a lost cause. “You know I retired from the ring. I wasn’t good enough.”

  “You were damned good.”

  He grinned. “Well, I met three in a row who was better. Were better. I retired, and then I looked for something to do, and Mr. Chance said to see if I liked working for him. Mr. Coulter, I mean.”

  It was an easy mistake for him to make. When I first met Chance that one syllable was the only name he had, and it wasn’t until he went into the art business that he added an initial in front and a surname after.

  “And do you like it?”

  “It beats getting hit in the face. And yes, I like it very much. I’m learning things. There’s never a day I don’t learn something.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” Chance said. “Matthew, it’s about time you came to see me. I thought you were going to join us last night, you and your friend. We all trooped downstairs to Eldon’s dressing room and when I turned around to introduce you you weren’t there.”

  “We decided not to make a long night of it.”

  “And it did turn out to be a long night. Do you still have a taste for good coffee?”

  “Do you still get that special blend?”

  “Jamaican Blue Mountain. The price is outrageous, of course, but look around you.” He indicated the masks and statues. “The price of everything is ridiculous. Black, right? Arthur, could you bring us some coffee? And then you’ll want to get at those invoices.”

  He had first served me Jamaican coffee at his home, a converted firehouse on a quiet street in Greenpoint. His Polish neighbors thought the house belonged to a housebound retired physician named Levandowski, and that Chance was the good doctor’s houseman and chauffeur. Instead Chance lived there alone in a house with a full weight gym and an eight-foot pool table and walls lined with museum-quality African art.

  I asked if he still had the firehouse.

  “Oh, I couldn’t bear to move,” he said. “I thought I’d have to sell in order to open this place, but I found a way. After all, I didn’t have to purchase stock. I had a house jammed full of it.”

  “Do you still have a collection?”

  “Better than ever. In a sense it’s all my collection, and in another sense everything I have is for sale, so it’s all store stock. Do you remember that Benin bronze? The queen’s head?”

  “With all the necklaces.”

  “I overpaid for her at auction, and every three months when she didn’t sell I raised the price. It finally got so high somebody couldn’t resist her. I hated to see her go, but then I took the money and bought something else.” He took my arm. “Let me show you some things. I was in Africa for a month this spring, I spent two full weeks in Mali, in the Dogon country. A sweetly primitive people, their huts reminded me of the Anasazi dwellings at Mesa Verde. See, that piece is Dogon. Square holes for eyes, everything very straightforward and unapologetic.”

  “You’ve come a long way,” I said.

  “Oh, my,” he said. “Haven’t I just?”

  When I first met Chance he was successful, but in another line of work. He had been a pimp, though hardly the traditional figure with the pink Cadillac and the floppy purple hat. He’d hired me to find out who killed one of his girls.

  “I owe it all to you,” he said. “You put me out of business.”

  That was true in a sense. By the time I’d done what he hired me to do, another of his girls was dead and the rest were off his string. “You were ready for a career change anyway,” I told him. “You were having a mid-life crisis.”

  “Oh, I was too young for that. I’m still too young for that. Matthew? You didn’t just drop in to be sociable.”

  “No.”

  “Or for the coffee.”

  “Or that either. There was somebody I saw at the fights last night. I thought maybe you might be able to tell me who he is.”

  “Somebody with me? Somebody in Rasheed’s corner?”

  I shook my head. “Somebody sitting first row ringside in the center section.” I sketched a diagram in midair. “Here’s the ring, here’s where you were sitting right by the blue corner. Here’s where Ballou and I were. The guy I’m interested in was sitting right about here.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “White man, balding, say five-eleven, say a hundred and ninety pounds.”

  “Cruiserweight. How was he dressed?”

  “Blue blazer, gray trousers. Blue polka-dot tie with large dots on it.”

  “The tie’s the first thing that doesn’t sound like everybody else. I might have noticed a tie like that, but I don’t believe I ever saw it.”

  “He had a boy with him. Early teens, light brown hair. Might have been his son.”

  “Oh, I did see them
,” Chance said. “At least I saw a father and son in the front row, but I couldn’t tell you what either one of them looked like. The only reason I noticed them at all is he might have been the only child in the place.”

  “But you know who I mean.”

  “Yes, but I can’t tell you who he is.” He closed his eyes. “I can almost picture him, you know what I mean? I can just about see him sitting there, but if you asked me to describe him I don’t think I could do it, beyond parroting back the description you just gave. What did he do?”

  “Do?”

  “It’s some kind of case, isn’t it? I thought you were in Maspeth just to watch the fights, but I guess you were working, weren’t you?”

  On another case, but there was no reason to go into all that. “I had business there,” I said.

  “And this fellow’s a part of it but you don’t know who he is.”

  “He might be a part of it. I have to identify him in order to know.”

  “I get you.” He considered it. “He was right up in front,” he said. “Must be a real fan. Maybe he goes all the time. I was about to say I haven’t seen him at the Garden or anywhere else, but the truth is I’ve only been getting to the fights regularly since I bought an interest in Rasheed.”

  “You have a big piece of him, Chance?”

  “Very small, what you’d call minimum participation. You still like him? You said you did last night.”

  “He’s impressive. He got hit too much with the right hand, though.”

  “I know he did. The Kid was saying the same thing. That Dominguez, though, his right came over the top very quickly.”

  “He was sudden, all right.”

  “He was indeed. And then, suddenly, he was gone.” He smiled. “I love boxing.”

  “So do I.”

  “It’s brutal, it’s barbaric. I can’t justify it. But I don’t care. I love it.”

  “I know. Have you been to Maspeth before, Chance?”

  He shook his head. “Way at the ass end of nowhere, isn’t it? It’s actually not that far from where I am in Greenpoint, except I didn’t leave from Greenpoint when I went out there, and I didn’t go to Greenpoint when I left there, so it didn’t make me a whole lot of difference. I only went there because we had the fight there.”

  “Will you be going back?”

  “If we get another booking there, and if I don’t have something else requiring my presence. Next bout scheduled is three weeks from this coming Tuesday in Atlantic City.” He smiled. “Donald Trump’s place, it should be a little more luxurious than the New Maspeth Arena.”

  He told me who Rasheed was matched up with and said I ought to come down. I said I’d try. They wanted Rasheed to fight every three weeks, he said, but it was working out more like once a month.

  “I’m sorry I can’t help you,” he said. “I could ask around if you’d like. The people in Rasheed’s corner, they’re at the fights all the time. You still at the hotel?”

  “Same place.”

  “If I hear anything—”

  “I appreciate it, Chance. And, you know, it’s nice to see how everything’s turned out.”

  “Thank you.”

  At the door I said, “Oh, I almost forgot. Do you know anything about the placard girl?”

  “The what?”

  “You know. Prances around the ring holding up the number of the next round.”

  “They call that a placard girl?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose you could call her Miss Maspeth. I just wondered—”

  “If I knew anything about her. I can tell you she had long legs.”

  “I noticed that myself.”

  “And skin, I seem to remember she had a lot of skin. I’m afraid that’s the extent of my knowledge, Matthew. I’m out of that business, thanks to you.”

  “ ‘Out of that business.’ You think she looked like a working girl?”

  “No,” he said, “I think she looked like a nun.”

  “One of the Poor Clares.”

  “I was thinking a Sister of Charity. But you could be right.”

  Chapter 8

  There’s a saloon called Hurley’s on Sixth Avenue, diagonally across the street from the glass and steel tower where Five Borough Cable Sportscasts had a suite of offices. People from NBC have gone there for years, and Johnny Carson made the place famous back when he did his show live from New York; it was the site of all of his Ed McMahon drinking jokes. Hurley’s is still in its original location, housed in one of the only older buildings still standing on that stretch of Sixth. Television people still patronize the place, to kill an hour or an afternoon, and one fairly frequent visitor was Richard Thurman. He often came in at the end of the workday and stayed long enough to have one drink, sometimes two, before heading on home.

  I didn’t have to be the world’s greatest detective to learn this, because it was in the file Joe Durkin had let me read. I got to Hurley’s around four-thirty and stood at the bar with a glass of club soda. I’d had the thought of trying to pump the bartender but the place was crowded and he was far too busy for that sort of exploratory conversation. Besides, we’d have had to shout at each other in order to be heard.

  The fellow next to me wanted to talk about the Super Bowl, which had taken place the preceding Sunday. It was too one-sided to sustain a conversation for long, and it turned out we’d both turned it off at halftime. That common bond moved him to buy me a drink, but his enthusiasm dimmed when he found out I was drinking soda water and winked out altogether when I tried to turn the conversation to boxing. “That’s no sport,” he said. “A couple of ghetto kids trying to beat each other to death. Why not pull the stops out, give ’em both guns and let ’em shoot each other.”

  A little after five I saw Thurman come in. He was with another man about his age and they found standing room down at the far end of the bar from me. They ordered drinks, and after ten or fifteen minutes Thurman left by himself.

  A few minutes later so did I.

  THE restaurant on the ground floor of Thurman’s building on West Fifty-second was called Radicchio’s. I stood across the street and established that there were no lights on in the top-floor apartment. The one a flight below, the Gottschalk place, was also dark, with Ruth and Alfred in West Palm Beach for the season.

  I had skipped lunch, so I had an early dinner at Radicchio’s. There were only two other tables occupied, both by young couples deep in earnest conversation. I felt like calling Elaine and telling her to hop in a cab and join me, but I wasn’t sure that would be a good idea.

  I had some veal and a half-portion of farfalle, I think it’s called, a bowtie-shaped pasta which they served with a spicy red sauce. The small salad that came with the meal held plenty of the bitter leaf that had given the restaurant its name. A line on the menu advised me that a dinner without wine was like a day without sunshine. I drank water with my meal, and espresso afterward. The waiter brought an unrequested bottle of anisette to my table. I motioned for him to take it away.

  “Is no charge,” he assured me. “You put a drop in your ‘spresso, makes it taste good.”

  “I wouldn’t want it to taste that good.”

  “Scusi?”

  I motioned again for him to take the bottle and he shrugged and carried it back to the bar. I drank my espresso and tried not to imagine it tasting of anisette. Because it wasn’t the taste that something in me yearned for, any more than it was the taste that prompted them to bring the bottle to the table. If anise improved the flavor of coffee people would add a spoonful of seeds to the coffee grounds, and nobody does.

  It was the alcohol, that’s what called to me, and I suppose it had been crooning to me all day long, but its siren song had grown stronger in the past hour or two. I wasn’t going to drink, I didn’t want to drink, but some stimulus had triggered a cellular response and awakened something deep within me, something that would always be there.

  If I do go out, if I go and pick up a drink one of these days, it?
??ll be a quart of bourbon in my room, or maybe a bottle of Mick’s twelve-year-old Irish. It won’t be a demitasse of espresso with a spoonful of fucking anisette floating on the top.

  I looked at my watch. It was barely past seven, and the meeting at St. Paul’s doesn’t get under way until eight-thirty. But they open the doors an hour before the meeting starts, and it wouldn’t hurt me to get there early. I could help set up chairs, put out the literature and the cookies. On Friday nights we have a step meeting, with the discussion centering on one of the Twelve Steps that comprise AA’s spiritual program. This week we’d be back on the First Step. “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

  I caught the waiter’s eye and signaled for the check.

  AT the end of the meeting Jim Faber came up to me and confirmed our dinner date for Sunday. He’s my sponsor and we have a standing date for Sunday dinner, unless one of us has to cancel.

  “I think I’ll stop at the Flame,” he said. “I’m in no rush to get home.”

  “Something the matter?”

  “It’ll keep until Sunday. How about you, you want to get some coffee?”

  I begged off and walked up to Sixty-first and over to Broadway. The video store was open, and looked unchanged since six months ago. It had more of a crowd this time, though, with people looking to insure themselves against an empty weekend. There was a short line at the counter and I joined it. The woman in front of me took home three movies and three packages of microwave popcorn.

  The owner still needed a shave. I said, “You must sell a lot of popcorn.”

  “It’s a good item for us,” he agreed. “Most of the shops carry it. I know you, don’t I?”

  I gave him a card. It had my name and phone number and nothing else. Jim Faber had printed up a whole box of them for me. He looked at it and at me, and I said, “Back in July. A friend of mine rented a copy of The Dirty Dozen, and I—”