Lawrence Block - A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

"I'm more afraid of the knife."

"Ah, Jesus," he said. He showed me a French chef's knife with a wooden handle and a ten-inch carbon-steel blade. "Come on in," he said. "I ain't about to cut you, for Christ's sake." He led the way, setting the knife down on a little table near the door.

His apartment was tiny, two narrow little rooms. The only illumination came from a three-bulb ceiling fixture in the larger room. Two of the bulbs had burned out and the remaining one couldn't have been more than forty watts. He kept the place tidy but it had a smell to it, an odor of age and illness.

"Arnie Leveque," he said. "How'd you know him?"

"I didn't."

"No?" He yanked a handkerchief out of his back pocket and coughed into it. "Dammit," he said. "The bastards cut me from asshole to appetite but it didn't do no good. I waited too long. See, I was afraid of what they'd find." He laughed harshly. "Well, I was right, wasn't I?"

I didn't say anything.

"He was okay, Leveque. French Canadian, but he musta been born here because he talked like anybody else."

"Did he live here a long time?"

"What's a long time? I been here forty-two years. Can you believe that? Forty-two years in this shithole. Be forty-three years in September, but I expect to be out of here by then. Moved to smaller quarters." He laughed again and it turned into a coughing fit and he reached for the handkerchief. He got the cough under control and said, "Smaller quarters, like a box about six feet long, you know what I mean?"

"I guess it helps to joke about it."

"Naw, it don't help," he said. "Nothing helps. I guess Arnie lived here about ten years. Give or take, you know? He kept to his room a lot. Of course the way he was you wouldn't expect him to go tap-dancing down the street." I must have looked puzzled, because he said, "Oh, I forgot, you didn't know him. He was fat as a pig, Arnie was." He put his hands out in front of him and drew them apart as he lowered them. "Pear-shaped. Waddled like a duck. He was up on three, too, so he had two flights of stairs to climb if he went anywhere."

"How old was he?"

"I don't know. Forty? It's hard to tell when somebody's fat like that."

"What did he do?"

"For a living? I don't know. Had a job he went to. Then he wasn't going out so much."

"I understand he liked movies."

"Oh, he sure did. He had one of those things, what the hell do they call it, you watch movies on your TV set."

"A VCR."

"It woulda come to me in a minute."

"What happened to him?"

"Leveque? Ain't you paying attention? He died."

"How?"

"They killed him," he said. "What do you think?"

IT was a generic they, as it turned out. Arnold Leveque had died on the street, presumably the victim of a mugging. It was getting worse every year, the old man told me, what with people smoking crack and living on the street. They would kill you for subway fare, he said, and think nothing of it.

I asked when all this had happened, and he said it must have been a year ago. I said that Leveque had still been alive in April- Fielding's records indicated his most recent transaction had been on the nineteenth of that month- and he said he didn't have that good a head for dates anymore.

He told me how to find the super. "She don't do much," he said. "She collects the rents, that's about all." When I asked his name he said it was Gus, and when I asked his last name a sly look came over his face. "Just Gus is good enough. Why tell you my name when you ain't told me yours?"

I gave him one of my cards. He held it at arm's length and squinted at it, reading my name aloud. He asked if he could keep the card and I said he could.

"When I meet up with Arnie," he said, "I'll tell him you was looking for him." And he laughed and laughed.

GUS's last name was Giesekind. I found that out by checking his mailbox, which shows I'm no slouch as a detective. The super's name was Herta Eigen, and I found her two doors up the street where she had a basement apartment. She was a small woman, barely five feet tall, with a Central European accent and a wary, suspicious little face. She flexed her fingers as she talked. They were misshapen by arthritis but moved nimbly enough.

"The cops came," she said. "Took me downtown somewhere, made me look at him."

"To identify him?"

She nodded. " 'That's him,' I said. 'That's Leveque.' They bring me back here and I got to let them into his room. They walked in and I walked in after them. 'You can go now, Mrs. Eigen.' 'That's all right,' I said. 'I'll stay.' Because some of them are all right but some of them would steal the money off a dead man's eyes. Is that the expression?"

"Yes."

"The pennies off a dead man's eyes. Pennies, not money." She sighed. "So they finish poking around and I let them out and lock up after them, and I ask what do I do now, will somebody come for his things, and they say they'll be in touch. Which they never were."

"You never heard from them?"

"Nothing. Nobody tells me if his people are coming for his belongings, or what I'm supposed to do. When I didn't hear from them I called the precinct. They don't know what I'm talking about. I guess so many people get murdered nobody can bother to keep track." She shrugged. "Me, I got an apartment, I got to rent it, you know? I left the furniture, I brought everything else down here. When nobody came I got rid of it."

"You sold the videocassettes."

"The movies? I took them over on Broadway, he gave me a few dollars. Was that wrong?"

"I don't think so."

"I wasn't stealing. If he had family I would give it all to them, but he had nobody. He lived here for many years, Mr. Leveque. He was here already when I got this job."

"When was that?"

"Six years ago. Wait a minute, I'm wrong, seven years."

"You're just the superintendent?"

"What else should I be, the queen of England?"

"I knew a woman who was a landlady but she let on to the tenants that she was only the super."

"Oh, sure," she said. "I own the building, that's why I live in the basement. I'm a rich woman, I just have this love for living in the ground like a mole."

"Who does own the building?"

"I don't know." I looked at her and she said, "Sue me, I don't know. Who knows? There's a management company that hired me. I collect the rent, I give it to them, they do whatever they want with it. The landlord I never met. Does it matter who it is?"

I couldn't see how. I asked when Arnold Leveque had died.

"Last spring," she said. "Closer than that I couldn't tell you."

I went back to my hotel room and turned on the TV. Three different channels had college basketball games. It was too frenzied and I couldn't bear to watch. I found a tennis match on one of the cable channels and it was restful by comparison. I don't know that it would be accurate to say that I watched it, but I did sit in front of the set with my eyes open while they hit the ball back and forth over the net.

I met Jim for dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Ninth Avenue. We often had Sunday dinner there. The place never filled up and they didn't care how long we sat there or how many times they had to refill our teapot. The food's not bad, and I don't know why they don't do more business.

He said, "Did you happen to read the Times today? There was an article, an interview with this Catholic priest who writes hot novels. I can't think of his name."

"I know who you mean."

"He had this telephone poll to back him up, and he said how only ten percent of the married population of this country have ever committed adultery. Nobody cheats, that's his contention, and he can prove it because somebody called a bunch of people on the phone and that's what they told him."

"I guess we're in the grip of a moral renaissance."