Lawrence Block - A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

I talked some about Richard Thurman and his dead wife, and about the man we'd seen at the fights in Maspeth. I took out the sketch and he looked at it. "It's very like him," he said. "And the man who drew it never saw the man he was drawing? You wouldn't think it could be done."

I put the sketch away and he said, "Do you believe in hell?"

"I don't think so."

"Ah, you're fortunate. I believe in it. I believe there's a place reserved for me there, a chair by the fire."

"Do you really believe that, Mick?"

"I don't know about the fire, or little devils with fucking pitchforks. I believe there's something for you after you die, and if you lead a bad life you've got a bad lot ahead of you. And I don't lead the life of a saint."

"No."

"I kill people. I only do it out of need, but I lead a life that makes killing a requirement." He looked hard at me. "And I don't mind the killing," he said. "There are times I have a taste for it. Can you understand that?"

"Yes."

"But to kill a wife for the insurance money, or to kill a child for pleasure." He frowned. "Or taking a woman against her will. There's more men than you'd think who'll do that last. You'd think it was just the twisted ones but sometimes I think it's half the human race. Half the male sex, anyway."

"I know," I said. "When I was at the Academy they taught us that rape was a crime of anger toward women, that it wasn't sexual at all. But over the years I stopped believing that. Half the time nowadays it seems to be a crime of opportunity, a way to have sex without taking her to dinner first. You're committing a robbery or a burglary, there's a woman there, she looks good to you, so why not?"

He nodded. "Another time," he said. "Like last night, but over the river in Jersey. Dope dealers in a fine house out in the country, and we were going to have to kill everybody in the house. We knew that before we went in." He drank whiskey and sighed. "I'll go to hell for sure. Oh, they were killers themselves, but that's no excuse, is it?"

"Maybe it is," I said. "I don't know."

"It's not." He put the glass down and wrapped his hand around the bottle but didn't lift it from the table. "I'd just shot the man," he said, "and one of the lads was searching for more cash, and I heard cries coming from another room. So I went in there, and there's one of the boys on top of the woman, with her skirt up and her clothes ripped, and she's fighting him and crying out."

" 'Get off her,' I told him, and he looked at me like I was mad. She was choice, he said, and we were going to kill her anyway, so why shouldn't he have her before she was no use to anybody?"

"What did you do?"

"I kicked him," he said. "I kicked him hard enough to break three ribs, and then before I did anything else I shot her between the eyes, because she shouldn't have to put up with more of it. And then I picked him up and threw him against the wall, and when he came stumbling off it I hit him in the face. I wanted to kill him, but there were people who knew he'd worked for me and it would be like leaving a calling card behind. I took him away from there and paid him his share and got a closemouthed doctor to bandage his ribs, and then I packed him off. He was from Philadelphia, and I told him to go back there, that he was finished in New York. I'm sure he doesn't know to this day what he did that was wrong. She was going to die anyway, so why not have the use of her first? And why not roast her liver and eat it, why let the flesh go to waste?"

"There's a pretty thought."

"In the name of Jesus," he said, "we're all going to die, aren't we? So why not do any bloody thing we please with each other? Is that it? Is that how the world works?"

"I don't know how the world works."

"No, and neither do I. And I don't know how you get through it on fucking coffee, I swear I don't. If I didn't have this-"

He filled his glass.

LATER we were talking about black men. He had little use for them and I let him tell me why. "Now there's some who are all right," he said. "I'll grant you that. What was the name of that fellow we met at the fights?"

"Chance."

"I liked him," he said, "but you'd have to say he's another type entirely from the usual run. He's educated, he's a gentleman, he's a professional man."

"Do you know how I got to know him?"

"At his place of business, I would suppose. Or didn't you say you met him at the fights?"

"That's where we met, but there was a business reason for the meeting. That was before Chance was an art dealer. He was a pimp then. One of his whores got killed by a lunatic with a machete, and he hired me to look into it."

"He's a pimp, then."

"Not anymore. Now he's an art dealer."

"And a friend of yours."

"And a friend of mine."

"You have an odd taste in friends. What's so funny?"

" 'An odd taste in friends.' A cop I know said that to me."

"So?"

"He was talking about you."

"Was he now?" He laughed. "Ah, well. Hard to argue with that, isn't it?"

ON a night like that the stories come easy, and the silences between the stories are easy, too. He talked about his father and mother, both long gone, and about his brother Dennis who had died in Vietnam. There were two other brothers, one a lawyer and real estate broker in White Plains, the other selling cars in Medford, Oregon.

"At least he was the last I heard of him," he said. "He was going to be a priest, Francis was, but he lasted less than a year at the seminary. 'I learned I liked the girls and the gargle too much.' Hell, there's priests that have their share of both. He tried one thing and another and two years ago he was in Oregon selling Plymouths. 'It's great here, Mickey, come out and see me.' But I never did, and he's likely gone somewhere else by now. I think the poor bastard still wishes he was a priest, even though his faith's long since lost. Can you understand that?"

"I think so."

"Were you raised Catholic? You weren't, were you?"

"No. There were Catholics and Protestants in the family but nobody worked at it very hard. I grew up not going to church and wouldn't have known which one to go to. I even had one grandparent who was half-Jewish."

"Is that so? You could have been a lawyer like Rosenstein."

He told the story he'd started Thursday night, about the man who owned the factory in Maspeth where they assembled staple removers. The man had incurred gambling debts and wanted Mick to burn the place so he could collect the insurance. The arsonist Mick used had made a mistake and torched the place directly across the street instead. When Mick told the arsonist of his error the man insisted it was no problem, he'd go back the next night and do it right. And he'd include an extra for goodwill, he offered. He'd burn the man's house down and not charge him for it.

I told a story I hadn't thought of in years. "I was fresh out of the Academy," I said, "and they teamed me up with an old hairbag named Vince Mahaffey. He must have had thirty years in and he never made plainclothes and never wanted to. He taught me plenty, including things they probably didn't want me to learn, like the difference between clean graft and dirty graft and how to get as much of the first kind as you can. He drank like a fish and ate like a pig and he smoked those little Italian cigars. Guinea stinkers, he called them. I thought you had to be in one of the five families to smoke those things. He was a hell of a role model, Vince was.

"One night we caught one, a domestic disturbance, the neighbors called it in. This was in Brooklyn, in Park Slope. It's all gentrified there now, but this was before any of that got started. It was an ordinary white working-class neighborhood then.

"The apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up, and Mahaffey had to stop a couple of times along the way. Finally we're standing in front of the door and you can't hear a thing. 'Ah, shit,' Vince said. 'What do you bet he killed her? Now he'll be crying and yanking his hair out and we'll have to take him in.'