A Dance at the Slaughterhouse (16 page)

"It's hard to say. I wish I knew what he did the last seven years of his life."

"Hung out in bad neighborhoods, evidently. What else does a man have to do?"

"He didn't work and he wasn't collecting welfare or SSI that I can tell. I saw where he lived and his rent couldn't amount to much, but he had to have money from somewhere."

"Maybe he came into some money. It worked for Amanda Thurman."

"That would give them another point of similarity," I said. "I like your line of reasoning."

"Yeah, well, my mind never stops working. Even when I sleep."

"Especially when you sleep."

"You got it. What's this about he didn't work in seven years? He was working when they arrested him."

"Not according to the state records."

"Well, screw the state records," he said. "That's how he got cracked, he was the clerk when they violated the place for obscenity. Leveque, he's French, I guess they got him for postcards, don't you figure?"

"He was selling pornography?"

"Didn't you get that from Andreotti?"

"Uh-uh. Just the number of the code violation."

"Well, he could have got more than that with a little digging. They did a sweep of Times Square whenever it was, October of '85. Oh, sure, I remember that. It was right before the election; the mayor wanted to look good. I wonder what the new guy's gonna be like."

"I wouldn't want his job."

"Oh, Christ, if it was be mayor or hang myself I'd say, 'Gimme the rope.' Anyway, Leveque. They hit all the stores, bagged all the clerks, hauled off all the dirty magazines and called a press conference. A few guys spent a night in jail and that was the end of it. All charges were dropped."

"And they gave back the dirty books."

He laughed. "There's a stack of them in a warehouse somewhere," he said, "that nobody'll find till the twenty-third century. Of course, a few choice items might have been taken home to spice up some policeman's marriage."

"I'm shocked."

"Yeah, I figured you'd be. No, I don't guess they gave back the confiscated merchandise. But we had a guy just the other day, a street dealer, we locked him up and he walked on a technicality, and he wants to know can he have his dope back."

"Oh, come on, Joe."

"I swear to God. So Nickerson says to him, 'Look, Maurice, if I give you your dope back then I'll have to grab you for possession.' Just shucking him, you know? And the asshole says, 'No, man, you can't do that. Where's your probable cause?' Nick says what do you mean probable cause, my probable cause is I just handed you the fucking dope an' I seen you put it in your pocket. Maurice says no, it'd never stand up, I'd skate. And do you want to know something? I think he's probably right."

JOE gave me the address of the Times Square store where Leveque had taken his brief fall. It was on the block between Eighth and Broadway, right on the Deuce, and since I could tell that from the number I didn't see any reason why I should go down there and look at it. I didn't know if he'd worked there for a day or a year and there was no way I was going to find out. Even if they wanted to tell me, it was unlikely that anybody knew.

I went over my notes for a few minutes, then leaned back and put my feet up. When I closed my eyes I got a quick flash of the man in Maspeth, the perfect father, smoothing his kid's hair back.

I decided I was reading too much into a gesture. I really didn't have a clue what the guy in the movie looked like under all that black rubber. Maybe the boy had looked like the youth in the film, maybe that was what had triggered my memory.

And even if it was the right guy? How was I going to find him by sniffing the fading spoor of some sad bastard who'd been dead for the better part of a year?

Thursday I'd seen them at the fights. It was Monday now. If it was his son, if the whole thing was innocent, then I was just spinning my wheels. If not, then I was too late.

If he'd planned to kill the boy, to spill his blood down the drain in the floor, it was odds-on he'd done it by now.

But why take him to the fights in the first place? Maybe he liked to work out an elaborate little psychodrama, maybe he had a protracted affair with a victim first. That would explain why the boy in the film had been so unafraid, even blase about being tied up on a torture rack.

If the boy was dead already there was nothing I could do for him. If he was alive there wasn't much I could do, either, because I was light years from identifying and locating Rubber Man and I was closing on him at a snail's pace.

All I had was a dead man. And what did I have there? Leveque died with a tape, and the tape showed Rubber Man killing a boy. Leveque had died violently, probably but not necessarily the victim of an ordinary mugging in a part of town where muggings were commonplace. Leveque had worked at a porno shop. He'd worked there off the books, so he could have worked there for years, except that Gus Giesekind had said that he stayed in most of the time, unlike a man with a regular job.

And his last regular job-

I reached for the phone book and looked up a number. When the machine answered I left a message. Then I grabbed my coat and headed over to Armstrong's.

HE was at the bar when I walked in, a slender man with a goatee and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a brown corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches and smoking a pipe with a curved stem. He would have looked perfectly at home in Paris, sipping an aperitif in a cafe on the Left Bank. Instead he was drinking Canadian ale in a Fifty-seventh Street saloon, but he didn't look out of place.

"Manny," I said, "I just left you a message."

"I know," he said. "It was still recording when I walked in the door. You said you'd look for me here, so I walked right back out the door again. I didn't have to stop to put my coat on because I hadn't had time to take it off. And, since I live closer to this joint than you do-"

"You got here first."

"So it would appear. Shall we get a table? It's good to see you, Matt. I don't see enough of you."

We used to see each other almost daily when Jimmy's old Ninth Avenue place had been a second home to me. Manny Karesh had been a regular there, dropping in for an hour or so, sometimes hanging around for a whole evening. He was a technician at CBS and lived around the corner. Never a heavy drinker, he came to Jimmy's as much for the food as the beer, and more than either for the company.

We took a table and I ordered coffee and a hamburger and we brought each other up to date. He'd retired, he told me, and I said I'd heard something to that effect.

"I'm working as much as ever," he said. "Free-lancing, sometimes for my former employers and for anyone else who'll hire me. I have all the work I could want, and at the same time I'm collecting my pension."

"Speaking of CBS," I said.

"Were we?"

"Well, we are now. There's a fellow I want to ask you about because you might have known him some years ago. He worked there for three years and left in the fall of '82."

He took his pipe from his mouth and nodded. "Arnie Leveque," he said. "So he called you after all. I had wondered if he would. Why are you looking so puzzled?"

"Why would he call me?"

"You mean he didn't call you? Then why-"

"You first. Why would he have called?"

"Because he wanted a private detective. I ran into him on a shoot. It must have been, oh, six months ago."

Longer than that, I thought.

"And I don't know how it came up, but he wanted to know if I could recommend a detective, although I couldn't swear he used the word. I said that I knew a fellow, an ex-cop who lived right here in the neighborhood, and I gave him your name and said I didn't know your number offhand, but you lived at the Northwestern. You're still there?"

"Yes."

"And you're still doing that sort of work? I hope it was all right to give out your name."

"Of course it was," I said. "I appreciate it. But he never called me."

"Well, I haven't seen him since then, Matt, and I'm sure it's been six months, so if you haven't heard from him by now you probably won't."

"I'm sure I won't," I said, "and I'm pretty sure it's been more than six months. He's been dead since last May."

"You're not serious. He's dead? He was a young man. He carried far too much weight, of course, but even so." He took a sip of beer. "What happened to him?"

"He was killed."

"Oh, for God's sake. How?"

"Stabbed by a mugger. Apparently."

" 'Apparently.' There's a suspicion of foul play?"

"Mugging's reasonably foul play all by itself, but no, there's no official suspicion. Leveque ties into something I'm working on, or at least he may. Why did he want a private detective?"

"He didn't say." He frowned. "I didn't know him all that well. When he started at CBS he was young and eager. He was a technical assistant, part of a camera crew. I don't think he was with us very long."

"Three years."

"I would have said less than that."

"Why did he leave?"

He tugged at his beard. "My sense of it is that we let him go."

"Do you remember why?"

"I doubt that I'd have known in the first place. I don't know that he blotted his copybook, as our British cousins would say, but young Arnold never had what you might call a winning personality. He was a sort of overgrown nerd, which is not a word you'll hear me use often. Still, that's what he was, and he tended to be somewhat casual about matters of personal hygiene. Went a little long between shaves, and wore the same shirt a day or two more than custom dictates. And of course he was fat. Some men are as fat but carry their weight well. Arnold, alas, was not of their number."

"And afterward he got free-lance work?"

"Well, that's what he was doing the last time I ran into him. On the other hand, I've been free-lancing for several years now and I can think of only one other time we were on the same shoot. I guess he must have worked steadily enough, though, because he couldn't have missed many meals."

"He clerked for a while in a Times Square bookstore."

"You know," he said, "I can believe it. It somehow fits him. There was always something furtive about Arnie, something damp-palmed and out of breath. I can imagine someone slipping stealthily into one of those places and encountering Arnie behind the counter, rubbing his hands together and giving you a sly look." He winced. "My God, the man's dead, and look how I'm talking about him." He struck a match and got his pipe going again. "I've made him sound like the evil lab assistant in a Frankenstein remake. Well, he'd be a good choice for the part. Always speak ill of the dead, as my sainted mother used to advise me. Because they're in no position to get back at you."

"It's kind of spooky," Elaine said. "He died before he could get in touch with you. Then he reached out to you from beyond the grave."

"How do you figure that?"

"Well, what else would you call it? There's a tape in his room when he dies, and his landlady sells it-"

"She's only a super."

"- to a video store, and they rent it out to someone who runs straight to you with it. What are the odds on that?"

"We're all in the neighborhood. Me, Manny, Leveque, Will Haberman, the video place. That puts the needle in a fairly small haystack."

"Uh-huh. What did you tell me coincidence is? God trying to maintain His anonymity?"

"That's what they say."

I'd called her after I left Manny at Armstrong's. She had a cold coming on, she said, and she'd been feeling achy and crummy and sneezy all day. "All those dwarfs," she said, "except Bashful." She was taking a lot of vitamin C and drinking hot water with lemon juice. She said, "What do you really think happened with Leveque? How does he fit in?"

"I think he was the cameraman," I said. "There had to be a fourth person in the room when they made that movie. The camera moved around, zoomed in and out. You can make a home video by positioning the camera and performing in front of it, but that's not what they did, and a lot of the time they were both in the shot at the same time and the camera was moving around to cover the action."

"I never noticed. I was too centered on what was happening."

"You only saw it once. I saw it two more times the other day, don't forget."

"So you could concentrate on the fine points."

"Leveque had a background in video. He worked for three years at a network, admittedly in a menial capacity. He got some work since then on a free-lance basis. And he clerked in a Times Square bookstore and got arrested during one of Koch's cleanup campaigns. If you were going to pick someone to film a dirty movie, he'd be a logical choice."

"But would you let him film you committing murder?"

"Maybe they had enough on him so that they didn't have to worry. Maybe the murder was unplanned, maybe they were just going to hurt the boy a little and they got carried away. It doesn't matter. The boy got killed and the film got made, and if Leveque didn't operate the camcorder somebody else did."

"And he wound up with a tape."

"And he concealed it," I said. "According to Herta Eigen, the only tapes in his apartment were the ones she sold to Fielding. That doesn't figure. Somebody in the trade would be certain to have a lot of noncommercial cassettes around. He was an old film buff, he probably taped things off TV all the time. He probably kept copies of his own camera work, pornographic or otherwise. And he would have had a few blank cassettes around in case he found a use for them."

"You think she was lying?"

"No, what I think is that somebody went to his place on Columbus Avenue while his body temperature was dropping in an alley on West Forty-ninth. His watch and wallet were missing, which suggests robbery, but so were his keys. I think whoever killed him took his keys and went to his apartment and walked out with every cassette except the commercial recordings."