Lawrence Block - A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

"But we rang the bell and they both answered it, a man and a woman. He was a big guy around thirty-five, a construction worker, and she looked like a girl who'd been pretty in high school and let herself go. And they were surprised to hear that we'd had a complaint. Oh, had they been making too much noise? Well, maybe they'd been playing the TV a little loud. It wasn't even on now, the whole place was silent as a grave. Mahaffey pushed it the least little bit, said we'd had a report of sounds of a struggle and a loud argument, and they looked at each other and said, well, yeah, they'd had a discussion that turned into a little bit of an argument, maybe they shouted at each other some, and maybe he'd pounded on the kitchen table to make a point, and they'd be careful to keep it down for the rest of the evening, because they certainly didn't want to disturb anybody.

"He'd been drinking but I wouldn't have said he was drunk, and they were both calm and anxious to please, and I was ready to wish 'em goodnight and get on to something else. But Vince had been to hundreds of domestics and this one smelled and he could tell. I might have picked up on it myself if I hadn't been so new. Because they were hiding something. Otherwise they'd have said there was no fight and no problem and told us to go to hell.

"So he stalled, talking about this and that, and I'm wondering what's the matter with him, is he waiting for the husband to break out the bottle and offer us drinks. And then we both heard a noise, like a cat but not like a cat. 'Oh, it's nothing,' they said, but Mahaffey pushed them out of the way and opened a door, and we found a little girl there, seven years old but small for her age, and now you could see why the domestic disturbance hadn't left any marks on the wife. All of the marks were on the girl.

"The father had beaten the shit out of her. Bruises all over her, one eye closed, and marks on one arm where they burned her with cigarettes. 'She fell down,' the mother insisted. 'He never touched her, she fell down.'

"We took them to the station house and parked them in a holding cell. Then we took the kid to a hospital, but first Mahaffey dragged her into an empty office and borrowed somebody's camera. He undressed the kid except for her underpants and took a dozen pictures of her. 'I'm a shit photographer,' he said. 'If I take enough shots maybe something'll come out.'

"We had to let the parents go. The doctors at the hospital confirmed what we already knew, that the child's injuries could only have been the result of a beating, but the husband was swearing he didn't do it and the wife was backing him up, and you weren't going to get testimony out of the kid. And they were very reluctant to prosecute child abuse in those days anyway. It's a little better now. At least I think it is. But we had no choice but to cut the parents loose."

"You must have wanted to kill the bastard," Mick said.

"I wanted to put him away. I couldn't believe that he could do something like that and get away with it. Mahaffey told me it happened all the time. You hardly ever got a case like that to court, not unless the child died and sometimes not then. Then why, I asked, had he bothered taking the pictures? He patted me on the shoulder and told me the pictures were worth a thousand words apiece. I didn't know what he was talking about.

"Middle of the next week we're in the car. 'It's a nice day,' he said. 'Let's go for a ride, let's go to Manhattan.' I didn't know where the hell he was taking me. We wound up on Third Avenue in the Eighties. It was a construction site, they'd knocked down a batch of small buildings and were putting up a big one. 'I found out where he drinks,' Mahaffey said, and we went into this neighborhood tavern, Carney's or Carty's or something, it's long gone now. The place was full of guys with work shoes and hard hats, construction workers on their break or at the end of their shift, having a ball and a beer and unwinding.

"Well, we were both in uniform, and the conversation stopped when we walked in. The father was at the bar in the middle of a knot of his buddies. It's funny, I don't remember his name."

"Why should you? As many years ago as it was."

"You would think I would remember. Anyway, Mahaffey walked right through them all and went up to the guy, and he turned to the men standing around and asked them if they knew him. 'You think he's all right? You think he's a decent sort of a guy?' And they all said sure, he's a good man. What else are they going to say?

"So Mahaffey opens his blouse, his blue shirt, and he takes out a brown envelope, and it's got all the pictures he took of the kid. He had them blow them up to eight-by-ten, and they all came out perfect. 'This is what he did to his own fucking child,' Mahaffey says, and he passes the pictures around. 'Take a good look, this is what the bastard does to a defenseless child.' And, when they've all had a good look, he tells them we're cops, we can't put this man in jail, we can't lay a finger on this man. But, he says, they aren't cops, and once we're out the door we can't stop them from doing whatever they think they have to do. 'And I know you're good American working men,' he tells them, 'and I know you'll do the right thing.' "

"What did they do?"

"We didn't hang around to watch. Driving back to Brooklyn Mahaffey said, 'Matt, there's a lesson for you. Never do something when you can get somebody else to do it for you.' Because he knew they'd do it, and we found out later that they damn near killed the sonofabitch in the process. Lundy, that was his name. Jim Lundy, or maybe it was John.

"He wound up in the hospital and he stayed a full week. Wouldn't make a complaint, wouldn't say who did it to him. Swore he fell down and it was his own clumsiness.

"He couldn't go back to that job when he got out of the hospital because there was no way those men would work with him again. But I guess he stayed in construction and was able to get jobs, because a few years later I heard he went in the hole. That's what they call it when you're working high steel and you fall off a building, they call it going in the hole."

"Did someone push him?"

"I don't know. He could have been drunk and lost his balance, or he could have done the same thing cold sober, as far as that goes. Or maybe he gave somebody a reason to throw him off the building. I don't know. I don't know what happened to the kid, or to the mother. Probably nothing good, but that would just give them something in common with most of the rest of the world."

"And Mahaffey? I suppose he's gone by now."

I nodded. "He died in harness. They kept trying to retire him and he kept fighting it, and one day- I wasn't partnered with him by then, I had just made detective on the strength of a terrific collar that was ninety-eight percent luck- anyway, one day he was climbing the stairs of another tenement and his heart cut out on him. He was DOA at Kings County. At his wake everybody said that was the way he would have wanted it, but they got that wrong. I knew what he wanted. What he wanted was to live forever."

NOT long before dawn he said, "Matt, would you say that I'm an alcoholic?"

"Oh, Jesus," I said. "How many years did it take me to say I was one myself? I'm not in a hurry to take anybody else's inventory."

I got up and went to the men's room, and when I came back he said, "God knows I like the drink. It'd be a bad bastard of a world without it."

"It's that kind of world either way."

"Ah, but sometimes this stuff lets you lose sight of it for a while. Or at least it softens the focus." He lifted his glass, gazed into it. "They say you can't stare at an eclipse of the sun with your naked eye. You have to look through a piece of smoked glass to save your vision. Isn't it as dangerous to see life straight on? And don't you need this smoky stuff to make it safe to look at?"