Lawrence Block - A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

"Arnold Leveque," he said. "Male Caucasian, died nine May. Multiple stab wounds. Not in our files because it wasn't our case. He was killed on the other side of Fifty-ninth Street. You want Midtown North, that's on West Fifty-fourth."

I told him I knew where it was.

THAT explained why Herta Eigen got the runaround from the cops at her local precinct- they hadn't known what she was talking about. I'd walked up to the Twentieth first thing after breakfast, and it was mid-morning when I got to Midtown North. Durkin wasn't in, but I didn't need him to run interference for me on this. Anybody could give me the information.

There was a cop named Andreotti whom I'd met a few times over the past year or two. He was at a desk catching up on his paperwork and didn't mind an interruption. "Leveque, Leveque," he said. He frowned and ran a hand through a mop of shaggy black hair. "I think I caught that one, me and Bellamy. A fat guy, right?"

"So they tell me."

"You see so many stiffs in a week you can't keep ' em straight. He musta been murdered. Natural causes, you can't even remember their names."

"No."

"Except if it's the kind of name you can't forget. There was a woman two, three weeks back, Wanda Plainhouse. I thought, yeah, I wouldn't mind playin' house with you." He smiled at the memory, then said, "Of course she was alive, Wanda, but it's an example of how one name'll stick in your mind."

He pulled Leveque's file. The film buff had been found in a narrow alley between two tenements on Forty-ninth Street west of Tenth Avenue. The body had been discovered after an anonymous call to 911 logged in at 6:56 on the morning of May 9th. The medical examiner estimated the time of death at around eleven the previous night. The deceased had been stabbed seven times in the chest and abdomen with a long, narrow-bladed knife. Any of several of the wounds would have been sufficient to cause death.

"Forty-ninth between Tenth and Eleventh," I said.

"Closer to Eleventh. The buildings on either side were scheduled for demolition, X's on the windows and nobody living in 'em. I think they might have come down by now."

"I wonder what he was doing there."

Andreotti shrugged. "Looking for something and unlucky enough to find it. Looking to buy dope, looking for a woman or a man. Everybody's out there looking for something."

I thought of TJ. Everybody's got a jones, he'd said, or what would they be doing on the Deuce?

I asked if Leveque had been a drug user. No outward signs of it, he said, but you never knew. "Maybe he was drunk," he offered. "Staggering around, didn't know where he was. No, that's not it. Blood alcohol's not much more than a trace. Well, whatever he was looking for, he picked the wrong place to look for it."

"You figured robbery?"

"No money in his pockets, no watch and wallet. Sounds like a killer with a crack habit and a switchblade."

"How'd you ID him?"

"The landlady where he lived. She was some piece of work, man. About this high, but she wasn't taking no shit. Let us into his room and stood there watching us like a hawk, like we'll clean the place out if she turns her back. You'd think it was her stuff, which it probably wound up being, because I don't think we ever did turn up any next of kin." He flipped through the few sheets of paper. "No, I don't think we did. Anyway, she ID'd him. She didn't want to go. 'Why I got to look at a dead body? I seen enough in my life, believe me.' But she took a good look and said it was him."

"How did you know to ask her? What gave you his name and address?"

"Oh, I get you. That's a good question. How did we know?" He frowned, paging through the file. "Prints," he said. "His prints were in the computer and that gave us the name and address."

"How did his prints happen to be on file?"

"I don't know. Maybe he was in the service, maybe he had a government job once. You know how many people got their prints on file?"

"Not in the NYPD computer."

"Yeah, you're right." He frowned. "Did we have him or did we have to hook into the main system in Washington? I don't remember. Somebody else probably took care of it. Why?"

"Did you see if he's got a sheet?"

"If he did it must have been jaywalking. There's no notation in his file."

"Could you check?"

He grumbled but did it anyway. "Yeah, just one entry," he said. "Arrested four, almost five years ago. Released OR and charges dropped."

"What charges?"

He squinted at the computer screen. "Violation of Section 235 of the Criminal Code. What the hell is that, it's not a number I'm familiar with." He grabbed up the black looseleaf binder and flipped through it. "Here you go. Obscenity. Maybe he called somebody a bad name. Charges dismissed, and four years later somebody sticks a knife in him. Teach you not to talk nasty, wouldn't it?"

I probably could have learned more about Leveque if Andreotti had felt like jockeying the computer, but he had things of his own to do. I went to the main library on Forty-second Street and checked the Times Index on the chance that Arnold Leveque might have made the paper, but he'd managed to be spared publicity when he got arrested and when he got killed.

I took the subway down to Chambers Street and visited a few state and city government offices, where I found several public employees who were willing to do me a favor if I did them favors in return. They checked their records, and I slipped them some money.

I managed to learn that Arnold Leveque had been born thirty-eight years ago in Lowell, Massachusetts. By the time he was twenty-three he was in New York, living at the Sloane House YMCA on West Thirty-fourth and working in the mailroom of a textbook publisher. A year later he had left the publisher and was working for a firm called R amp; J Merchandise, with an address on Fifth Avenue in the Forties. He was a salesclerk there. I don't know what they sold, and the firm no longer existed. There are a lot of little clip joints on that stretch of Fifth Avenue, salted in among the legitimate stores and having endless Going Out Of Business sales, hawking dubious ivory and jade, cameras and electronic gear. R amp; J might well have been one of them.

He was still at Sloane House then, and as far as I could tell he stayed there until he moved to Columbus Avenue in the fall of '79. The move may have been prompted by a job switch; a month earlier he had started work at CBS, located a block west of my hotel on Fifty-seventh Street. He'd have been able to walk to work from his new lodgings.

I couldn't tell what he did at CBS, but they only paid him $16,000 a year to do it, so I don't suppose they made him president of the network. He was at CBS a little over three years, and he was up to $18,500 when he left in October of '82.

As far as I could tell he hadn't worked since.

THERE was mail for me back at the hotel. I could join an international association of retired police officers and attend annual conventions in Fort Lauderdale. The benefits of membership included a membership card, a handsome lapel pin, and a monthly newsletter. What on earth could they run in the newsletter? Obituaries?

There was a message to call Joe Durkin. I caught him at his desk, and he said, "I understand Thurman's not enough for you. You're trying to clear all our open files."

"Just trying to be helpful."

" Arnold Leveque. How does he tie into Thurman?"

"He probably doesn't."

"Oh, I don't know. He got it in May and she got it in November, almost six months to the day. Looks to me like a definite pattern's shaping up."

"The MO's a little different."

"Well, she was raped and strangled by burglars and he got knifed in an alleyway, but that's just because the killers want to throw us off track. Seriously, you got anything going with Leveque?"