A Dance at the Slaughterhouse (33 page)

So I had a choice of midnight meetings, and I could tell Burke to let Mick know I was looking for him, and that I'd be back by one-thirty at the latest. But something stopped me, something kept me on my stool and led me to order another Coke when my glass was empty.

I was in the john when Mick finally showed up a little before one. When I emerged he was at the bar with his bottle of JJ amp;S and his Waterford tumbler. "Good man," he said. "Burke told me you were here and I said he should put on a pot of coffee. I hope you're up for a long night."

"Just a short night tonight," I said.

"Ah, well," he said. "Maybe I can get you to change your mind."

We sat at our usual table and he filled his glass and held it to the light. "By God that's a good color," he said, and he took a drink.

"If you ever quit drinking," I said, "they make a cream soda that's just about the same shade."

"Is that a fact?"

"Of course you'd have to let it go flat," I said, "or it'd have a head on it."

"Spoil the effect, wouldn't it?" He took a drink and sighed. "Cream soda indeed," he said.

We talked about nothing much, and then I leaned forward and said, "Do you still need money, Mick?"

"I've not got holes in my shoes," he said.

"No."

"But I always need money. I told you that the other night."

"You did."

"Why?"

"I know where you can get some," I said.

"Ah," he said. He sat in silence for a moment, and a slight smile came and went, came and went. "How much money?"

"A minimum of fifty thousand. Probably a lot more than that."

"Whose money?"

A good question. Joe Durkin had reminded me that money knows no owner. It was, he'd said, a principle of law.

"A couple named Stettner," I said.

"Drug dealers?"

"Close. He deals in currencies, launders money for a pair of Iranian brothers from Los Angeles."

"Eye-ranians," he said, with relish. "Well, now. Maybe you should tell me more."

I must have talked for twenty minutes. I took out my notebook and showed him the sketches I'd made in Maspeth. There wasn't that much to tell, but he took me back over various points, covering everything thoroughly. He didn't say anything for a minute or two, and then he filled his glass with whiskey and drank it down as if it were cool water on a hot afternoon.

"Tomorrow night," he said. "Four men, I'd say. Two men and myself, and Andy for the driving. Tom would do for one of them, and either Eddie or John. You know Tom. You don't know Eddie or John."

Tom was the day bartender, a pale tight-lipped man from Belfast. I'd always wondered what he did with his evenings.

"Maspeth," he said. "Can any good thing come out of Maspeth? By God, there we sat watching the niggers punching each other and all the time there's a money laundry beneath our feet. Is that why you went out there then? And brought me along for company?"

"No, it was work took me out there, but I was working on something else at the time."

"But you kept your eyes open."

"You could say that."

"And put two and two together," he said. "Well, it's just the kind of situation I can use. I don't mind telling you, you've surprised me."

"How?"

"By bringing this to me. It seems unlike you. It's more than a man does out of friendship."

"You pay a finder's fee," I said. "Don't you?"

"Ah," he said, and a curious light came into his eyes. "That I do," he said. "Five percent."

He excused himself to make a phone call. While he was gone I sat there and looked at the bottle and the glass. I could have had some of the coffee Burke had made but I didn't want any. I didn't want the booze either.

When he came back I said, "Five percent's not enough."

"Oh?" His face hardened. "By God, you're full of surprises tonight, aren't you? I thought I knew ye. What's the matter with five percent, and how much is it you think you ought to have?"

"There's nothing wrong with five percent," I said. "For a finder's fee. I don't want a finder's fee."

"You don't? Well, what in hell do you want?"

"A full share," I said. "I want to be a player. I want to go in."

He sat back and looked at me. He poured a drink but didn't touch it, breathed in and breathed out and looked at me some more.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said finally. "Well, I'll be fucking damned."

In the morning I finally got around to stowing The Dirty Dozen in my safe-deposit box. I bought an ordinary copy to take to Maspeth, then began to imagine some of the things that might go wrong. I returned to the bank and retrieved the genuine article, and I left the replacement cassette in the box so I wouldn't mix them up later on.

If I got killed out in Maspeth, Joe Durkin could watch the cassette over and over, searching for a hidden meaning.

All day long I kept thinking that I ought to go to a meeting. I hadn't been to one since Sunday night. I thought I'd go at lunch hour but didn't, and then I thought about a Happy Hour meeting around five-thirty, and finally figured I'd catch at least the first half of my usual meeting at St. Paul's. But I kept finding other things to do.

At ten-thirty I walked over to Grogan's.

Mick was there, and we went into his office in the back. There's an old wooden desk there, and a safe, along with a pair of old-fashioned wooden office chairs and a Naugahyde recliner. There's an old green leather sofa, too, and sometimes he'll catch a few hours on it. He told me once he has three apartments around town, each of them rented in a name other than his own, and of course he has the farm upstate.

"You're the first," he said. "Tom and Andy'll be here by eleven. Matt, have you thought it over?"

"Some."

"Have you had second thoughts, man?"

"Why should I?"

"It's no harm if you do. There'll likely be bloodshed. I told you that last night."

"I remember."

"You'll have to carry a gun. And if you carry one-"

"You have to be willing to use it. I know that."

"Ah, Jesus," he said. "Are ye sure ye have the heart for it, man?"

"We'll find out, won't we?"

He opened the safe and showed me several guns. The one he recommended was a SIG Sauer 9-mm automatic. It weighed a ton and I figured you could stop a runaway train with it. I played with it, working the slide, taking the clip out and putting it back, and I liked the feel of it. It was a nice piece of machinery and it looked intimidating as all hell. But I wound up giving it back and choosing a.38 S amp;W short-barreled revolver instead. It lacked the SIG Sauer's menacing appearance, to say nothing of its stopping power, but it rode more comfortably tucked under my belt in the small of my back. More to the point, it was a close cousin to the piece I'd carried for years on the job.

Mick took the SIG for himself.

By eleven Tom and Andy had both arrived, and each had come into the office to select a weapon. We kept the office door closed, of course, and we were all pacing around, talking about the good weather, telling each other it would be a piece of cake. Then Andy went out and brought the car around and we filed out of Grogan's and got into it.

The car was a Ford, a big LTD Crown Victoria about five years old. It was long and roomy, with a big trunk and a powerful engine. I thought at first it had been stolen for the occasion, but it turned out to be a car Ballou had bought a while back. Andy Buckley kept it garaged up in the Bronx and drove it on occasions of this sort. The plates were legitimate but if you ran them you wouldn't get anywhere; the name and address on the registration were fictitious.

Andy drove crosstown on Fifty-seventh Street and we took the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge into Queens. I liked his route better than the one I had taken. Nobody talked much once we were in the car, and after we crossed the bridge the silence was only rarely interrupted. Maybe a locker room's like that in the minutes before a championship game. Or maybe not; in sports they don't shoot the losers.

I don't suppose the trip took us much more than half an hour door to door. There was no traffic to speak of and Andy knew the route cold. So it must have been somewhere around midnight when we reached the arena. He had not been driving fast, and he slowed down now to around twenty miles an hour and we looked at the building and scanned the surrounding area as we coasted on by.

We went up one street and down another, and from time to time we would pass the arena and take a good look at it. The streets were as empty as they'd been the night before, and the lateness of the hour made them seem even more desolate. After we'd cruised around for twenty minutes or more Mick told him to give it a rest.

"Keep driving back and forth and some fucking cop's going to pull us over and ask if we're lost."

"I haven't seen a cop since we crossed the bridge," Andy said.

Mick was up front next to Andy. I was in back with Tom, who hadn't opened his mouth since we left Mick's office.

"We're early," Andy said. "What do you want me to do?"

"Park near the place but not on top of it," Mick told him. "We'll sit and wait. If somebody rousts us we'll go home and get drunk."

We wound up parked half a block from the arena on the opposite side of the street. Andy cut the engine and shut off the lights. I sat there trying to figure out which precinct we were in so I'd know who might come along and roust us. It was either the 108 or the 104, and I couldn't remember where the boundary ran or where we were in relation to it. I don't know how long I sat there, frowning in concentration, trying to picture the map of Queens in my mind, trying to impose a map of the precincts on top of it. Nothing could have mattered less, but my mind groped with the question as if the fate of the world depended on the answer.

I still hadn't settled it when Mick turned to me and pointed at his watch. It was one o'clock. It was time to go in.

I had to walk in there alone. That figured to be the easy part, but it didn't feel so easy when it was time to do it. There was no way to know what kind of reception awaited me. If Bergen Stettner had decided reasonably enough that it was cheaper and safer to kill me than to pay me off, all he had to do was open the door a crack and gun me down before I so much as set eyes on him. You could fire a cannon and no one would hear it, or give a damn if they did.

And I didn't even know that they were there. I was right on time and they figured to have been in place hours ago. They were the hosts, and it made no sense for them to arrive late to their own party. Still, I hadn't seen a car on the street that figured to be theirs, and there'd been no signs of life in the arena visible to us out on the street.

There was probably garage space inside the building. I'd seen what looked like a garage door at the far end. If I'd been in his position, I'd want to have a parking spot indoors. I didn't know what he drove, but if it was anything like the rest of his lifestyle it wasn't something you'd want to leave out on the street.

Busywork for the mind, like trying to figure out the precinct. They were there or they weren't; they'd greet me with a handshake or a bullet. And I knew they were there, anyway, because I could feel eyes watching me as I approached the door. I had the cassette in my coat pocket, figuring they wouldn't shoot until they'd made sure I had the thing with me. And I had the.38 Smith where I'd stashed it earlier, under my coat and suit jacket and wedged beneath the waistband of my pants. It would be handier now in my coat pocket, but I'd want to have it within reach after I took the coat off, and-

They'd been watching me, all right. The door opened before I could knock on it. And there was no gun pointing at me. Just Bergen Stettner, dressed as I'd seen him Thursday night in the suede sport jacket. His pants were khaki this time, and looked like army fatigues, and he had the cuffs tucked into the tops of his boots. It was a curious outfit and the parts shouldn't have gone together, but somehow he made it work.

"Scudder," he said. "You're right on time." He thrust his hand at me and I shook it. His grip was firm, but he didn't make a contest of it, just pumped my hand briskly and let go.

"Now I recognize you," he said. "I remembered you but I had no mental picture of you. Olga says you remind her of me. Not physically, I shouldn't think. Or do we look alike, you and I?" He shrugged. "I can't see it myself. Well, shall we go downstairs? The lady awaits us."

There was something stagy about his performance, as if we were being observed by an unseen audience. Was he taping this? I couldn't imagine why.

I turned and caught hold of the door, drawing it shut. I had a wad of chewing gum in my hand and I shoved this into the door's locking mechanism, so that the spring lock would remain retracted when the door was shut. I didn't know if it would work, but then I didn't think it was necessary; Ballou could kick the door in, or shoot his way through the lock if he had to.

"Leave it," Stettner told me. "It locks automatically." I turned from the door and he was at the head of the stairs, urging me on with a bow that was at once gracious and self-mocking.

"After you," he said.

I preceded him down the stairs and he caught up with me at the bottom. He took my arm and led me all the way down the hallway, past the rooms I'd sneaked a look at, to an open door at the very end. The room within was a sharp contrast to the rest of the building, and had certainly not served as the location for their film epic. It was an oversize chamber, perhaps thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, with a deep pile carpet of gray broadloom underfoot and an off-white fabric covering and softening the concrete block walls.

At the far end of the room I saw a king-size waterbed, with a throw covering it that looked to be zebraskin. A painting hung over the bed, a geometrical abstract, all right angles and straight lines and primary colors.