Lawrence Block - When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

"I suppose it happened."

"I suppose it did but when did you ever hear of it? Nowadays you got a different class of people, they don't respect anything. Of course there's that church inBensonhurst, I guess they keep whatever hours they want to."

"What do you mean?"

"I thinkit'sBensonhurst. Big church, I forget the name of it. Saint Something or other."

"That narrows it down."

"Don't you remember? Couple of years ago two black kids stole something off the altar. Gold candlesticks, whatever the hell it was. And it turns out DominicTutto's mother goes to mass there every morning. The capo, runs half ofBrooklyn?"

"Oh, right."

"And the word went out, and a week later the candlesticks are back on the altar. Or whatever the hell they were. I think it was candlesticks."

"Whatever."

"And the punks who took 'em," he said, "disappeared. And the story I heard, well, you don't know if it was anything more than a story. I wasn't there, and I forget who I heard it from, but he wasn't there either, you know?"

"What did you hear?"

"I heard they hauled the two niggers toTutto's basement," he said, "and hung 'emon meat hooks." A flashbulb winked two tables away from us. "And skinned 'emalive," he said. "But who knows? You hear all thesestories, you don't know what to believe."

"YOU should've been with us this afternoon," Skip told me. "Me and Keegan andRuslander, we took my car and drove out to the Big A." He drawled in imitation of W. C. Fields: "Participated in the sport of kings, made our contribution to the improvement of the breed, yes indeed."

"I was doing some work."

"I'd have been better off working. Fucking Keegan, he's got a pocket full of miniatures, he's knocking 'emoff one a race,he's got his pockets full of these little bottles. And he's betting horses on the basis of their names. There's thisplater, Jill the Queen, hasn't won anything since Victoria was the queen, and Keegan remembers this girl named Jill he had this mad passion for in the sixth grade. So of course he bets the horse."

"And the horse wins."

"Of course the horse wins. The horse wins at something like twelve-to-one, and Keegan's got a ten-dollar win ticket on her, and he's saying he made a mistake. What mistake? 'Her name was Rita,' he says. 'It was her sister's name was Jill. I remembered it wrong.' "

"That's Billie."

"Well, the whole afternoon was like that," Skip said. "He bets his old girlfriends and their sisters and he drinks half a quart of whiskey out of these little bottles, andRuslander and I both lose I don't know, a hundred, hundred and fifty, and fucking Billie Keegan wins six hundred dollars by betting on girls' names."

"How did you andRuslander pick horses?"

"Well, you know the actor. He hunches his shoulders and talks out of the side of his mouth like a tout, and he talks to a couple ofhorsey -looking guys and comes back with a tip. The guys he talks to are probably other actors."

"And you both followed his tips?"

"Are you crazy? I bet scientific."

"You read the form?"

"I can't make sense out of it. I watch which ones have the odds drop when the smart money comes in, and also I go down and watch 'emwalk around, and I notice which one takes a good crap."

"Scientific."

"Absolutely.Who wants to invest serious money in some fucking constipated horse? Some steed wracked with irregularity? My horses"- he lowered his eyes, mock-shy- "are M/O-kay."

"And Keegan's crazy."

"You got it. The man trivializes a scientific pursuit." He leaned forward, ground out his cigarette. "Ah, Jesus, I love this life," he said. "I swear to God I was born for it. I spend half my life running my own saloon and the other half in other people's saloons, with a sunny afternoon away from it now and then to get close to nature and commune with God's handiwork." His eyes locked on mine. "I love it," he said levelly. "That's why I'mgonna paythose cock-suckers."

"You heard from them?"

"Before we left for the track.They presented their nonnegotiable demands."

"How much?"

"Enough to make my bets seem somehow beside the point.Who cares if you win or lose a hundred dollars? And I don't bet heavy, it's not fun once it gets into serious money. They want serious money."

"And you're going to pay it?"

He picked up his drink. "We're meeting with some people tomorrow. The lawyer, the accountants. That's ifKasabian stops throwing up."

"And then?"

"And then I suppose we try to negotiate the nonnegotiable, and then we fucking pay. What else are the lawyers and accountants going to tell us? Raise an army? Fight a guerrilla war? That's not the kind of answer you get from lawyers and accountants." He took another cigarette from the pack, tapped it, held it up, looked at it, tapped it again,then lit it. "I'm a machine that smokes and drinks," he said through a cloud of smoke, "and I'll tell you, I don't know why I fucking bother with any of it."

"A minute ago you loved this life."

"Was I the one who said that? You know the story about the guy bought a Volkswagen and his friend asks him how does he likeit? 'Well, it's like eating pussy,' the guy says. 'I'm crazy about it, but I don't take a whole lot of pride in it.' "

I called Drew Kaplan the next morning before I went out toBrooklyn. His secretary said he was in a meeting, and could he call me back? I said I'd call him back, and I did forty minutes later when I got off the subway inSunsetPark. By then he'd gone for lunch. I told her I'd call back later.

That afternoon I managed to meet a woman who was friendly with Angel Herrera's girlfriend. She had strongIndio features and a face badly pitted by acne. She said it was a pity for Herrera that he had to go to jail, but it was probably good for her friend, because Herrera would never marry her or even live with her because he considered himself still married inPuerto Rico. "An' his wife divorce him, but hedoan accept it," she said. "So myfren, shewanna get pregnant, but hedoan get her pregnant and hewoan marry her. What's she want with him, you know? Better for her if he goes away for a while. Better for everybody."

I called Kaplan again from a street corner phone booth and reached him this time. I got out my notebook and gave him what I had. None of it added up to anything as far as I could see, except for Cruz's prior arrest for manslaughter, which was something he should have known about, as he was quick enough to point out himself. "That's not something an investigator should have to come up with," he said. "They should have put that on the table. True, you can't introduce it in court, but there's ways to use it. You may have earned your fee with that little bit of information. Not that I want to discourage you from digging for more."

But when I'd hung up the phone I didn't really feel like digging for more. I went over to the Fjord and had a couple of drinks, but then a lanky kid with a lot of yellow hair and a blond Zapata moustache came in and tried to hustle me into a game on the shuffle-bowling machine. I wasn't interested and neither was anyone else, so he went and played the thing by himself, feigning noisy drunkenness, I suppose in an attempt to look like easy pickings. The noise drove me out of there, and I wound up walking all the way to Tommy's house onColonial Road.

His key unlocked the front door. I walked in, half expecting the scene that had greeted the discoverer of MargaretTillary's body, but of course things had been cleaned up and put right long ago, after the lab crew and the photographer had done their work and gone.

I walked through the rooms on the ground floor, found the side entrance that led to a vestibule off the kitchen, walked back through the kitchen and the dining room, trying to imagine myself into Cruz and Herrera's shoes as they moved through the rooms of the empty house.