A Dance at the Slaughter House (Matthew Scudder #9) 4

"I guess we're in the grip of a moral renaissance."

"That's his point." He picked up his chopsticks, mimed a drumroll. "I wonder if he called my house."

"Oh?"

Avoiding my eyes, he said, "I think Beverly's seeing somebody."

"Somebody in particular?"

"A guy she met in Al-Anon."

"Maybe they're just friends."

"No, I don't think so." He poured tea for both of us. "You know, I screwed around a lot before I got sober. Whenever I went to a bar I told myself I was looking to meet somebody. Generally all I got was drunk, but now and then I got lucky. Sometimes I even remembered it."

"And sometimes you'd rather you didn't."

"Well, sure. The point is I didn't give that up completely when I first came into the program. The marriage almost ended during the worst of the drinking, but I bottomed out and sobered up and we worked things out. She started going to Al-Anon, started dealing with her own issues, and we hung together. I would still have something going on the side, you know."

"I didn't know."

"No?" He thought about it. "Well, I guess that was before I knew you, before you got sober. Because I stopped fooling around after a couple of years. It was no great moral decision to reform. I just didn't seem to be doing that anymore. I don't know, the health thing may have been a factor, first herpes and then AIDS, but I don't think I got scared off. I think I lost interest." He took a sip of tea. "And now I'm one of Father Feeney's ninety percent, and she's out there."

"Well, maybe it's her turn. To have a little fling."

"This isn't the first time."

"Oh," I said.

"I don't know how I feel about it."

"Does she know that you know?"

"Who knows what she knows? Who knows what I know? I just wanted things to stay the way they were, you know? And they never do."

"I know," I said. "I was with Elaine last night and she said the M word."

"What's that, motherfucker?"

"Marriage."

"Same thing," he said. "Marriage is a motherfucker. She wants to get married?"

"She didn't say that. She said if we were to get married, then she'd stop seeing clients."

"Clients?"

"Johns."

"Oh, right. That's the condition? Marry me and I'll stop?"

"No, nothing like that. Just speaking hypothetically, and then she apologized for saying the word and we both agreed we want things to stay the way they are." I looked down into my teacup the way I used to look into a glass of whiskey. "I don't know if that's going to be possible. It seems to me that when two people want something to stay just the way it is, that's when it changes."

"Well," he said, "you'll have to see how it goes."

"And take it a day at a time, and don't drink."

"I like that," he said. "It has a nice ring to it."

WE sat there a long while, talking about one thing and another. I talked about my cases, the legitimate one that I couldn't seem to come to grips with and the other one that I couldn't seem to leave alone. We talked about baseball and how spring training might be delayed by an owners' lockout. We talked about a kid in our home group with a horrendous history of drugs and alcohol who'd gone out after four months of sobriety.

Around eight he said, "What I think I'll do tonight, I think I'll go to some meeting where I won't run into anybody I know. I want to talk about all this shit with Bev at a meeting and I can't do that around here."

"You could."

"Yeah, but I don't want to. I'm an old-timer, I've been sober since the Flood, I wouldn't want the newcomers to realize I'm not a perfect model of serenity." He grinned. "I'll go downtown and give myself permission to sound as confused and fucked-up as I feel. And who knows? Maybe I'll get lucky, find some sweet young thing looking for a father figure."

"That's a good idea," I said. "Find out if she's got a sister."

I went to a meeting myself. There's no meeting at St. Paul's on Sundays, so I went to one at Roosevelt Hospital. A fair number of the people who showed up were in-patients from the detox ward. The speaker had started out as a heroin addict, kicked that in a twenty-eight-day residential program in Minnesota, and devoted the next fifteen years to alcoholic drinking. Now she was almost three years sober.

They went around the room after she was done, and most of the patients just said their names and passed. I decided I'd say something, if just to tell her I enjoyed her story and was glad she was sober, but when it got to me I said, "My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic. I'll just listen tonight."

Afterward I went back to the hotel. No messages. I sat in my room reading for two hours. Someone had passed along a paperback volume called The Newgate Calendar, a case-by-case report on British crimes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I'd had it around for a month or so, and at night I would read a few pages before I went to sleep.

It was mostly interesting, although some cases were more interesting than others. What got to me some nights, though, was the way nothing changed. People back then killed each other for every reason and for no reason, and they did it with every means at their disposal and all the ingenuity they could bring to bear.

Sometimes it provided a good antidote for the morning paper, with its deadening daily chronicle of contemporary crime. It was easy to read the paper each day and conclude that humanity was infinitely worse than ever, that the world was going to hell and that hell was where we belonged. Then, when I read about men and women killing each other centuries ago for pennies or for love, I could tell myself that we weren't getting worse after all, that we were as good as we'd ever been.

On other nights that same revelation brought not reassurance but despair. We had been ever thus. We were not getting better, we would never get better. Anyone along the way who'd died for our sins had died for nothing. We had more sins in reserve, we had a supply that would last for all eternity.

WHAT I read that night didn't pick me up, and neither did it ready me for sleep. Around midnight I went out. It had turned colder, and there was a raw wind blowing off the Hudson. I walked over to Grogan's Open House, the old Irish saloon Mick owns, although there's another name than his on the license and ownership papers.

The place was almost empty. Two solitary drinkers sat well apart at the long bar, one drinking a bottle of beer, the other nursing a black pint of Guinness. Two old men in long thrift-shop overcoats shared a table along the wall. Burke was behind the bar. Before I could ask he volunteered that Mick hadn't been in all evening. "He could come in any time," he said, "but I don't expect him."

I ordered a Coke and sat at the bar. The TV was tuned to a cable channel that broadcasts old black-and-white films uninterrupted by commercials. They were showing Little Caesar, with Edward G. Robinson.

I watched for half an hour or so. Mick didn't come in, and neither did anyone else. I finished my Coke and went home.

Chapter 10

The cops at the Twentieth Precint weren't overly impressed that I'd been on the job once myself. They were courteous all the same, and would have been happy to fill me in on the circumstances of Arnold Leveque's death. There was only one problem. They had never heard of him.

"I don't know the date," I said, "but it happened sometime between April nineteenth and June fourth, and if I were guessing I'd say early May."

"That's of last year."

"Right."

"That's Arnold Leveque? You want to spell the last name again, make sure I got it right?"

I did, and supplied the Columbus Avenue address. "That's here in the Two-oh," he said. "Lemme see if anybody heard of the guy." No one had. He came back and we puzzled over it for a few minutes, and then he excused himself again. He came back with a bemused expression on his face.

"Arnold Leveque," he said. "Male Caucasian, died nine May. Multiple stab wounds. Not in our files because it wasn't our case. He was killed on the other side of Fifty-ninth Street. You want Midtown North, that's on West Fifty-fourth."

I told him I knew where it was.

THAT explained why Herta Eigen got the runaround from the cops at her local precinct- they hadn't known what she was talking about. I'd walked up to the Twentieth first thing after breakfast, and it was mid-morning when I got to Midtown North. Durkin wasn't in, but I didn't need him to run interference for me on this. Anybody could give me the information.

There was a cop named Andreotti whom I'd met a few times over the past year or two. He was at a desk catching up on his paperwork and didn't mind an interruption. "Leveque, Leveque," he said. He frowned and ran a hand through a mop of shaggy black hair. "I think I caught that one, me and Bellamy. A fat guy, right?"

"So they tell me."

"You see so many stiffs in a week you can't keep 'em straight. He musta been murdered. Natural causes, you can't even remember their names."

"No."

"Except if it's the kind of name you can't forget. There was a woman two, three weeks back, Wanda Plainhouse. I thought, yeah, I wouldn't mind playin' house with you." He smiled at the memory, then said, "Of course she was alive, Wanda, but it's an example of how one name'll stick in your mind."

He pulled Leveque's file. The film buff had been found in a narrow alley between two tenements on Forty-ninth Street west of Tenth Avenue. The body had been discovered after an anonymous call to 911 logged in at 6:56 on the morning of May 9th. The medical examiner estimated the time of death at around eleven the previous night. The deceased had been stabbed seven times in the chest and abdomen with a long, narrow-bladed knife. Any of several of the wounds would have been sufficient to cause death.

"Forty-ninth between Tenth and Eleventh," I said.

"Closer to Eleventh. The buildings on either side were scheduled for demolition, X's on the windows and nobody living in 'em. I think they might have come down by now."

"I wonder what he was doing there."

Andreotti shrugged. "Looking for something and unlucky enough to find it. Looking to buy dope, looking for a woman or a man. Everybody's out there looking for something."

I thought of TJ. Everybody's got a jones, he'd said, or what would they be doing on the Deuce?

I asked if Leveque had been a drug user. No outward signs of it, he said, but you never knew. "Maybe he was drunk," he offered. "Staggering around, didn't know where he was. No, that's not it. Blood alcohol's not much more than a trace. Well, whatever he was looking for, he picked the wrong place to look for it."

"You figured robbery?"

"No money in his pockets, no watch and wallet. Sounds like a killer with a crack habit and a switchblade."

"How'd you ID him?"

"The landlady where he lived. She was some piece of work, man. About this high, but she wasn't taking no shit. Let us into his room and stood there watching us like a hawk, like we'll clean the place out if she turns her back. You'd think it was her stuff, which it probably wound up being, because I don't think we ever did turn up any next of kin." He flipped through the few sheets of paper. "No, I don't think we did. Anyway, she ID'd him. She didn't want to go. 'Why I got to look at a dead body? I seen enough in my life, believe me.' But she took a good look and said it was him."