A Dance At The Slaughterhouse Part 27

"The place is a little lowdown. You got a problem with that?"

"No problem."

"I'm in a lowdown mood. Where am I gonna go, the Carlyle? The Rainbow Room?"

"I'll be right over," I said.

Pete's All-American is on the west side of Tenth Avenue a block up from Grogan's. It's been there for generations but remains an unlikely candidate for the National Register of Historic Places. It has never been anything but a bucket of blood.

It smelled of stale beer and bad plumbing. The bartender looked up without interest when I came in the door. The half-dozen old lags at the bar didn't bother to turn around. I walked past them to a table in back where Joe was sitting with his back to the wall. There was an overflowing ashtray on the table, along with a rocks gla.s.s and a bottle of Hiram Walker Ten High. They aren't supposed to bring the bottle to the table like that, it's a violation of an SLA rule, but a lot of people will bend the rules for somebody who shows them a gold s.h.i.+eld.

"You found the joint," he said. "Get yourself a gla.s.s."

"That's all right."

"Oh, right, you don't drink. Never touch the dirty stuff." He picked up his gla.s.s, drank some, made a face. "You want a c.o.ke or something? You gotta get it yourself, they're not big on service here."

"Maybe later."

"Sit down then." He ground out his cigarette. "Jesus Christ, Matt. Jesus Christ."

"What's the matter?"

"Ah, s.h.i.+t," he said. He reached down beside him, came up with the videoca.s.sette and tossed it onto the table. It skidded off and landed in my lap. "Don't drop that," he said. "I had a h.e.l.l of a time getting it back. They didn't want to give it to me. They wanted to keep it."

"What happened?"

"But I pitched a b.i.t.c.h," he went on. "I said, hey, you ain't gonna play the game, you can give back the bat and ball. They didn't like it but it was easier to give it to me than to put up with all the h.e.l.l I was raising." He drained his gla.s.s and banged it down on the tabletop. "You can forget about Stettner. There's no case."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean there's no case. I talked to cops, I talked to an ADA. You got a whole batch of different things and they don't add up to d.i.c.k."

"One thing you've got," I said, "is a visual record of two people committing murder."

"Yeah," he said. "Right. That's what I saw and that's what I can't get out of my f.u.c.king head and that's why I'm drinking bad whiskey in the worst s.h.i.+thole in town. But what does it really amount to? He's got a hood covers most of his face and she's got a f.u.c.king mask. Who are they? You say it's Bergen and Olga and I say you're probably right, but can you imagine putting the two of them in the dock and making a jury watch this and trying to make an identification on that basis? 'Bailiff, will you please remove the female defendant's dress so the jury can get a good look at her t.i.ts, see if they match the set in the movie?' Because the t.i.ts are all you really get a good look at."

"You get to see her mouth."

"Yeah, and there's generally something in it. Look, here's the point. Odds are you could never get the tape seen by a jury. Any defense attorney's gonna try and get it disallowed, and they most likely could, because it's inflammatory. I'll f.u.c.king well say it's inflammatory. It inflamed the s.h.i.+t out of me, it made me want to jail those two f.u.c.kers and weld the cell door shut."

"But a jury can't see it."

"Probably not, but before it gets that far they tell me you can't even get an indictment, because what have you got to present to a grand jury? First off, who was murdered?"

"A kid."

"A kid we don't know zip about. Maybe his name is Happy and maybe he comes from Texas or South Carolina or some state where they play a lot of high school football. Where's the body? n.o.body knows. When did the alleged homicide take place? n.o.body knows. Did he really get killed? n.o.body knows."

"You saw it, Joe."

"I see stuff on TV and in the movies all the time. Special effects, they call it. They got these hero killers, Jason, Freddie, they're in one movie after another, wasting people left and right. I'll tell you, they make it look as good as Bergen and Olga."

"There were no special effects in what we saw. That was home video."

"I know that. I also know that the tape doesn't amount to evidentiary proof that a murder was committed, and that without the where and the when and some proof that somebody actually got killed, you got next to nothing to walk into a courtroom with."

"What about Leveque?"

"What about him?"

"His murder's a matter of record."

"So? There is nothing anywhere to link Arnold Leveque to either of the Stettners. The only tie is the unsupported testimony of Richard Thurman, who's conveniently dead himself and who told you this in a private conversation with no witnesses present, and it's all hearsay and almost certainly not allowable. And not even Thurman could connect the Stettners to the film. He said Leveque was trying to blackmail Stettner with a film, but he also said Stettner got that film and that was the end of it. You can be positive in your own mind that we're talking about the same film here, and you can work it out that Leveque was the cameraman and was there when the kid's blood went down the drain, but that's not proof. You couldn't even say it in court without some lawyer jumping straight down your throat."

"What about the other boy? Bobby, the younger one."

"Jesus," he said. "What have you got? You've got a sketch based on a look you got at him sitting next to Stettner at a boxing match. You got some kid somebody hunted up who says he recognizes the kid and his name's Bobby, but he doesn't know his last name or where he's from or what happened to him. You got somebody else who says Bobby used to be with a pimp who used to threaten kids that he'd send them out and they wouldn't come back."

"His name's Juke," I said. "He shouldn't be too hard to trace."

"He was a cinch, as a matter of fact. People complain a lot about the computer system but it makes some things easy. Juke is a guy named Walter Nicholson. A/k/a Juke, a/k/a Juke Box. First bit he did was for breaking into coin-operated vending machines, which is where the nickname came from. Arrested for statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and immoral solicitation. In other words a lot of pimping arrests, a whole profile of pimping kids. A cla.s.s act."

"Can't you pick him up? He could tie Bobby to Stettner."

"You got to get him to talk, which would be hard without having something to hold over his head, which I don't see here. And then you'd have to get somebody to believe anything a sc.u.mbag like Juke might say. But you can't do any of that because the p.r.i.c.k happens to be dead."

"Stettner got him."

"No, Stettner didn't get him. He-"

"The same as he got Thurman, to get rid of a witness before anybody could get to him. Dammit, if I'd come in right away, if I hadn't waited over the weekend-"

"Matt, Juke got killed a week ago. And Stettner didn't have anything to do with it and probably doesn't even know it happened. Juke and another of Nature's n.o.blemen shot each other in a social club on Lenox Avenue. They were fighting over a ten-year-old girl. Must be some hot broad, got two grown men shooting each other over her, don't you think?"

I didn't say anything.

"Look," he said, "I f.u.c.king hate this. I got the word last night and I went in this morning and carried on, and they're right. They're wrong but they're right. And I waited until tonight to call you because I wasn't looking forward to this conversation, believe it or not. Much as I like your company under other circ.u.mstances." He poured more whiskey into his gla.s.s. I got a whiff of it, but it didn't make me want it. Nor was it the worst smell in Pete's All-American.

I said, "I think I understand, Joe. I knew it was thin with Thurman dead."

"With Thurman alive I think we probably would have had them. But once he's dead there's no case."

"But if you mount a full-scale investigation-"

"Jesus," he said, "don't you get it? There's no grounds for an investigation. There's no complaint to act on, there's no probable cause for a warrant, there's a whole lot of nothing is what there is. The man's not a criminal, for openers. Never been arrested. You say mob connections, but his name's not in any files, never came up in any RICO investigations. Man's clean as a whistle. Lives on Central Park South, makes a good living trading in foreign currencies-"

"That's money laundering."

"So you say, but can you prove it? He pays his taxes, he gives to charities, he's made substantial political contributions-"

"Oh?"

"Don't give me that. It's not any clout that makes it impossible to take him down. n.o.body ordered us off it because the p.r.i.c.k's untouchable, he's got a hook with somebody important. No such thing. But he's not some street kid you can push around and never hear about it. You gotta have something'll stand up in court, and you want to know what stands up in court? Let me just say two words. You wanna hear two words? Warren Madison."

"Oh."

"Yeah, 'Oh.' Warren Madison, terror of the Bronx. Deals dope, kills four other dealers we know for sure and is listed as probable for five others, and when they finally corner this wanted fugitive in his mother's apartment he shoots six cops before they get the cuffs on him. He shoots six cops!"

"I remember."

"And that c.o.c.ksucker Gruliow defends him, and what does he do, what he always does, he puts the cops on trial. Spins out all this s.h.i.+t about how the Bronx cops were using Madison as a snitch, and they were giving him confiscated cocaine to sell, and then they tried to murder him to keep him from talking. Do you f.u.c.king believe it? Six police officers with bullets in 'em, not a single bullet in Warren f.u.c.king Madison, and that means it was all a police department plot to kill the f.u.c.k."

"The jury bought it."

"f.u.c.king Bronx jury, they would have cut Hitler loose, sent him home in a cab. And that's with a piece of s.h.i.+t of a dope dealer that everybody knew was guilty. You imagine what you'd get bringing a shaky case against a solid citizen like Stettner? Look, Matt, do you see what I mean? Do you want me to go over it again?"

I saw, but we went over it anyway. Somewhere in the course of it the Ten High began to get the upper hand. His eyes lost their sharp focus and he started slurring his words. Pretty soon he began repeating himself, losing track of his own arguments.

"Let's get out of this dive," I said. "Are you hungry? Let's get something to eat, maybe some coffee."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Just that I wouldn't mind some food."

"Horses.h.i.+t. Don't patronize me, you son of a b.i.t.c.h."

"I wasn't doing that."

"f.u.c.k you weren't. That what they teach you at those meetings? How to be a pain in the a.s.s when another man wants to have a quiet couple of drinks?"

"No."

"Just because you're some kind of candya.s.s who can't handle it anymore doesn't mean G.o.d appointed you to sober up the rest of the f.u.c.king world."

"You're right."

"Sit down. Where you going? For Christ's sake sit down."

"I think I'll get on home now," I said.

"Matt? I'm sorry. I was out of line there, okay? I didn't mean anything by it."

"No problem."

He apologized again and I told him it was fine, and then the booze took him back in the other direction and he decided he didn't like the tone of what I'd said. "Hang on one second," I told him. "Stay right where you are, I'll be back in a minute." And I walked out of there and headed home.

He was drunk, with the better part of a bottle still sitting there in front of him. He had his service revolver on his hip and I thought I recognized his car parked at the curb alongside a fire hydrant. It was a dangerous combination, but G.o.d hadn't appointed me to sober up the rest of the f.u.c.king world, or to make sure everybody got home safe, either.

Chapter 20.

When I went to sleep that night the videoca.s.sette was on the table next to the clock, and it was the first thing my eyes happened to hit the next morning. I left it there and went out to meet the day. That was Thursday, and while I didn't chase out to Maspeth to watch the fights that night, I did get home in time to catch the main event on television. Somehow it wasn't the same.

Another day pa.s.sed before it occurred to me that the ca.s.sette belonged in my safety-deposit box, and by then it was Sat.u.r.day and the bank was closed. I saw Elaine Sat.u.r.day; we spent the late afternoon browsing through art galleries in SoHo, ate at an Italian place in the Village, and listened to a piano trio at Sweet Basil. It was a day of long silences of the sort possible only for people who have grown very comfortable together. In the cab home we held hands and didn't say a word.

I had told her earlier about my conversation with Joe, and neither of us returned to the topic that afternoon or evening. The following night Jim Faber and I had our standing Sunday dinner date, and I didn't discuss the case with him at all. It crossed my mind once or twice in the course of our conversation but it wasn't something I felt the need to talk about.

It seems odd now, but I didn't even spend that much time thinking about it for those several days. It's not as though I had a great deal of other things on my mind. I didn't, nor did sports provide much in the way of diversion, not in that stretch of frozen desert that extends from the Super Bowl to the start of spring training.

The mind, from what I know of it, has various levels or chambers, and deals with matters in many other ways than conscious thought. When I was a police detective, and since then in my private work, there have not been that many occasions when I sat down and consciously figured something out. Most of the time the accretion of detail ultimately made a solution obvious, but, when some insight on my part was required, it more often than not simply came to me. Some unconscious portion of the mind evidently processed the available data and allowed me to see the puzzle in a new light.

So I can only suppose that I made an unconscious decision to shelve the whole subject of the Stettners for the time being, to put it out of my mind (or, perhaps, into my mind, into some deeper recess of self) until I knew what to do about it.

It didn't take all that long. As to how well it worked, well, that's harder to say.

TUESDAY morning I dialed 411 and asked for the number for Bergen Stettner on Central Park South. The operator told me she could not give out that number, but volunteered that she had a business listing for the same party on Lexington Avenue. I thanked her and broke the connection. I called back and got a different operator, a man, and identified myself as a police officer, supplying a name and s.h.i.+eld number. I said I needed an unlisted number and gave him the name and address. He gave me the number and I thanked him and dialed it.

A woman answered and I asked for Mr. Stettner. She said he was out and I asked if she was Mrs. Stettner. She took an extra second or two to decide, then allowed that she was.

I said, "Mrs. Stettner, I have something that belongs to you and your husband, and I'm hoping that you're offering a substantial reward for its return."

"Who is this?"

"My name is Scudder," I said. "Matthew Scudder."

"I don't believe I know you."

"We met," I said, "but I wouldn't expect you to remember me. I'm a friend of Richard Thurman's."

There was a p.r.o.nounced pause this time, while I suppose she tried to work out whether her friends.h.i.+p with Thurman was a matter of record. Evidently she decided that it was.

"Such a tragic affair," she said. "It was a great shock."

"It must have been."

"And you say you were a friend of his?"

"That's right. I was also a close friend of Arnold Leveque's."

Another pause. "I'm afraid I don't know him."