Lawrence Block - A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

"That's certainly a possibility. Maybe he filmed a lot of nasty scenes, maybe Rubber Man wasn't the person he was blackmailing. Maybe somebody else killed him. He may have considered calling me but he never did. He wasn't my client and it's not my job to solve his murder." A couple of lights winked on in the building across the street. I said, "It's not my job to do anything about Rubber Man, either. Thurman's my job and I'm not doing anything about him."

"Wouldn't it be nice if it all tied together?"

"I thought of that," I admitted.

"And?"

"I wouldn't count on it."

She started to say something, sneezed, and said she hoped what she had wasn't the flu. I said I'd see her tomorrow, and to stay with the vitamin C and the lemon juice. She said she would, even though she didn't honestly believe it did you the least bit of good.

I sat there for a while looking out the window. It was supposed to turn colder that night, with snow possible toward morning. I picked up The Newgate Calendar and read about a highwayman named Dick Turpin who had been something of a folk hero in his day, although it was hard to figure out why.

Around a quarter to eight I made a couple of calls and managed to reach Ray Galindez, a young police artist who had sat down with me and Elaine and sketched a man who'd threatened to kill us both. I told him I had some work for him if he had an hour or two to spare. He said he could make some time in the morning, and we arranged to meet in the lobby of the Northwestern at ten.

I went to the eight-thirty meeting at St. Paul 's and straight home afterward. I thought I'd get to bed early, but instead I wound up sitting up for hours. I would read a paragraph or two about some cutthroat who'd been righteously hanged a couple of centuries ago, then put the book down and stare out the window.

I finally went to bed around three. It never did snow that night.

RAY Galindez showed up right on time and we went upstairs to my room. He propped his briefcase on the bed and took out a sketch pad and some soft pencils and an Art-Gum eraser. "After I talked with you last night," he said, "I could picture the guy I sketched for you last time. Did you ever catch him?"

"No, but I stopped looking. He killed himself."

"That right? So I guess you never saw him to compare him to the sketch."

I had, but I couldn't say so. "The sketch was right on the money," I said. "I showed it to a lot of people who recognized him on the basis of it."

He was pleased. "You still in touch with that woman? I can picture her apartment, all black and white, that view out over the river. Beautiful place."

"I'm in touch with her," I said. "As a matter of fact I see quite a bit of her."

"Oh yeah? A very nice lady. She still in the same place? She must be, a person'd be crazy to move from a place like that."

I said she was. "And she has the sketch you did."

"The sketch I did. Of that guy? That sketch?"

"Framed on the wall. She says it's a whole category of art the world has overlooked, and after I had the sketch photocopied she got it framed and hung it."

"You're kidding me."

"Swear to God. She had it in the living room but I got her to move it to the bathroom. Otherwise wherever you sat you felt as though he was looking right at you. I'm not putting you on, Ray, she's got it in a nice aluminum frame with non-glare glass and all."

"Jeez," he said. "I never heard of anything like that."

"Well, she's an unusual lady."

"I guess. You know, it's kind of nice to hear that. I mean, she's a woman with good taste. I remember the painting she had on the wall." He described the large abstract oil on the wall near the window, and I told him he had a hell of a memory. "Well, art," he said. "That's, you know, like my thing." He turned away, a little embarrassed. "Well, who've you got for me today? A real bad guy?"

"One very bad guy," I said, "and a couple of kids."

It was easier than I'd thought it would be. I had seen the older of the boys only on videotape and never had a really close look at the younger boy or the man. But I had looked at all three so intently and had thought about them so urgently that all three images were very clear in my mind. The visualization exercise Galindez used was helpful, too, but I think I'd have done as well without it. I didn't have to work to conjure up their faces. All I had to do was close my eyes and they were there.

In less than an hour he'd managed to transfer the images from my mind's eye to three 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of drawing paper. They were all there, the man I'd seen at ringside, the boy who'd been sitting beside him, and the other boy, the one we'd seen murdered.

We worked well together, Galindez and I. There were moments when he seemed to be reading my mind with his pencil, catching something beyond my descriptive abilities. And somehow the three sketches captured the emotional resonance of their subjects. The man looked dangerous, the younger boy blindly vulnerable, the older one doomed.

When we were done he put down his pencil and let out a sigh. "That takes it out of you," he said. "I don't know why, it's just sitting and sketching, I been doing it all my life. But it was like we were hooked up together there."

"Elaine would say we were psychically linked."

"Yeah? I felt something, like maybe I was linked with the three of them, too. Heavy stuff." I told him the sketches were just what I wanted and asked what I owed him. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "What did you give me last time, a hundred? That'd be fine."

"That was for one sketch. You did three this time."

"It was all in one shot, and what did it take me, an hour? A hundred's plenty."

I gave him a pair of hundreds. He started to protest and I told him the bonus was for signing his work. "The originals are for Elaine," I explained. "I'll get them framed and they'll be her Valentine's Day present."

"Jeez, it's time to start thinking about that, isn't it? Valentine's Day." Shyly he pointed to the gold band on his ring finger. "This is new since I saw you," he said.

"Congratulations."

"Thanks. You really want these signed? Because you don't have to pay me extra to sign 'em. I got to say I'm honored."

"Take the money," I said. "Buy something nice for your wife."

He grinned and signed each sketch.

I went downstairs with him. He wanted to catch the subway at Eighth Avenue, and I walked halfway to the corner with him and stopped off at a copy shop where they ran a couple dozen copies of each sketch while I went next door for a cup of coffee and a bagel. I left the originals to be framed at a little graphics gallery on Broadway, then returned to my room and used a rubber stamp to mark my name and address on the back of the copies. I folded a few of each to fit in my inside jacket pocket and went out again, heading on down to Times Square.

The last time I'd hung out on the Deuce was in the middle of a heat wave. Now it was bitter cold. I kept my hands in my pockets and my coat buttoned at the throat and wished I'd had the sense to wear gloves and a muffler. The sky was all shades of gray, and sooner or later we'd get the snow they had predicted.

For all of that, the street didn't look much different. The kids who stood in little bunches on the sidewalk wore somewhat heavier clothing, but you couldn't really say they were dressed for the weather. They tended to move around more, bopping to keep warm, but aside from that they looked pretty much the same.

I walked up one side of the block and down the other, and when a black kid murmured, "Smoke?" I didn't dismiss him with a quick shake of the head. Instead I flicked a finger toward a doorway and walked over to it. He came over right away, and his lips didn't move much when he asked me what I wanted.

I said, "I'm looking for TJ."