A Dance at the Slaughterhouse (12 page)

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-"

"I remember. What's the matter now? Don't tell me it happened again."

"Nothing like that. But something's come up that makes it important for me to trace the source of that cassette."

"I think I told you. An old woman brought it in along with a whole batch of others."

"You told me."

"And did I tell you I never saw her before or since? Well, it's been six months and I still haven't seen her. I'd love to help you, but-"

"You're busy now."

"That's for sure. It's always like this on Friday nights."

"I'd like to come back when it's quieter."

"That'd be better," he said, "but I don't know what I'd be able to tell you. I didn't have any more complaints, so I think that one tape must have been the only one with a dirty movie dubbed on top of it. As far as locating the woman, the source of it, you know everything I know."

"You may know more than you realize. What's a good time tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow? Tomorrow's Saturday. We open at ten in the morning and it's pretty quiet before noon."

"I'll come at ten."

"You know what? Make it nine-thirty. I generally get here early to catch up on the paperwork. I'll let you in and we can have a half hour before I open up."

THE next morning I read the Daily News with my eggs and coffee. An elderly Washington Heights woman had been killed watching television, struck in the head by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting on the street outside her apartment. The intended victim had undergone emergency surgery at Columbia Presbyterian and was in critical condition. He was sixteen years old, and police believed the shooting was drug-related.

The woman was the fourth bystander killed so far this year. Last year the city had set a record, with thirty-four bystanders gunned down. If present trends continued, the News announced, that record could fall in mid-September.

On Park Avenue, a handful of blocks from Chance's gallery, a man had leaned out the window of an unmarked white van to snatch the handbag of a middle-aged woman who was waiting for the light to change. She'd had the bag's strap looped around her neck, presumably to make it harder to steal, and when the van sped off she was dragged and strangled. A sidebar to the main article advised women to carry their bags in a manner that would minimize physical risk if the bag were stolen. "Or don't carry a purse at all," one expert suggested.

In Queens, a group of teenagers walking across the Forest Park golf course had come upon the body of a young woman who had been abducted several days earlier in Woodhaven. She'd been doing her grocery shopping on Jamaica Avenue when another van, a light blue one, pulled up at the curb. Two men jumped out of the back, grabbed her, hustled her into the van, and climbed in after her. The van was gone before anyone could think to get the number. A preliminary medical examination disclosed evidence of sexual assault and multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen.

Don't watch television, don't carry a purse, don't walk down the street. Jesus.

I got to the video store at nine-thirty. The owner, freshly shaved and wearing a clean shirt, led me to his office in the back. He remembered my name and introduced himself as Phil Fielding. We shook hands, and he said, "Your business card didn't say, but are you some kind of investigator? Something like that?"

"Something like that."

"Just like in the movies," he said. "I'd like to help if there was anything I could do, but I didn't know anything the last time I saw you and that was six months ago. I stayed around last night after we closed and checked the books on the chance that I might have the woman's name somewhere, but it was no go. Unless you've got an idea, something I haven't thought of-"

"The tenant," I said.

"You mean her tenant? The one who owned the tapes?"

"That's right."

"She said he died. Or did he skip out on the rent? My memory's a little vague, it wasn't a high-priority thing for me to remember. I'm pretty sure she said she was selling his things to recoup back rent that he owed."

"That's what you said in July."

"So if he died or just left town-"

"I'd still like to know who he was," I said. "Do many people own that many films on videocassette? I had the impression that most people rented them."

"You'd be surprised," he said. "We sell a lot. Children's classics, especially, even in this neighborhood where not that many people have kids. Snow White, The Wizard of Oz. We sold a ton of E.T. and we're selling Batman now, but it's not as strong as I would have predicted. A lot of people will buy the occasional favorite film. And of course there's a big market for exercise videos and instructional stuff, but that's a whole other area, that's not movies."

"Do you think many people would own as many as thirty films?"

"No," he said. "I'm guessing, but I'd say it'd be rare to own more than half a dozen. That's not counting exercise videos and football-highlight films. Or pornography, which I don't carry."

"What I'm getting at is that the tenant, the owner of these thirty cassettes, was probably a film buff."

"Oh, no question," he said. "This guy had all three versions of The Maltese Falcon. The original 1931 version with Ricardo Cortez-"

"You told me."

"Did I? I'm not surprised, it was fairly remarkable. I don't know where he got that stuff on video, I've never been able to find it in the catalogs. Yeah, he was a buff."

"So he probably rented films besides the ones he owned."

"Oh, I see what you're getting at. Yeah, I think that'd be a sure bet. A lot of people buy an occasional film, but everybody rents them."

"And he lived in the neighborhood."

"How do you know that?"

"If his landlady lived around here-"

"Oh, right."

"So he could have been a customer of yours."

He thought about it. "Sure," he said, "it's possible. It's even possible we had conversations about film noir, but I can't remember anything."

"You've got all your members programmed into your computer system, haven't you?"

"Yeah, it makes life a whole lot simpler."

"You said she brought in the bag of cassettes the first week in June. So if he was a customer, his account would have been inactive for the past seven or eight months."

"I could have a lot of accounts like that," he said. "People move, they die, some kid on crack breaks in and steals their VCR. Or they start doing business with somebody down the block and stop coming here. I've had people, I don't see them for months, and then they start coming in again."

"How many accounts do you figure you have that have been inactive since June?"

"I have no idea whatsoever," he said. "But I can certainly find out. Why don't you have a seat? Or browse around, maybe you'll find a movie you want to see."

It was past ten by the time he was finished, but no one had come knocking on the door. "I told you the mornings were slow," he said. "I came up with twenty-six names. These are people whose accounts have been inactive since the fourth of June, but who did rent at least one tape from us during the first five months of the year. Of course if he was sick a long time, stuck in the hospital-"

"Let me start with what you've got."

"All right. I copied the names and addresses for you, and phone numbers when they gave them. A lot of people won't give out phone numbers, especially women, and I can't say I blame them. I also have credit-card numbers, but I didn't copy those down because I'm supposed to keep that information confidential, although I suppose I could stretch a point if there's someone you can't trace any other way."

"I don't think I'll need it." He had copied the names on two sheets of lined notebook paper. I scanned them and asked if any of the names had struck a chord.

"Not really," he said. "I see so many people all day every day that I only remember the regulars, and I don't always recognize them or remember their names. With these twenty-six people I looked up what they'd checked out during the last year, that's what took me so long. I thought maybe one person would shape up very definitely as a film buff, with rental choices that made sense in terms of what he owned, but I couldn't find anything that looked like a buff profile."

"It was worth a try."

"That's what I thought. I'm pretty sure it was a man, that the landlady referred to her tenant as him, and some of the twenty-six are women, but I put everybody down."

"Good." I folded the sheets of paper, tucked them into my breast pocket. "I'm sorry to have put you to so much trouble," I said. "I appreciate it."

"Hey," he said, "when I think of all the pleasure you guys have brought me on the screen, how could I turn you down?" He grinned, then turned serious. "Are you trying to bust a porn ring? Is that what this is all about?" When I hesitated he assured me that he understood if I couldn't talk about it. But would I at least drop by when it was all over and tell him how it had turned out?