A Dance at the Slaughter House

Page 8

Waiting for sleep to come I found myself remembering the man I'd seen in Maspeth, the father who'd sat with his son in the front row of the center section. I knew I'd seen him somewhere and I still couldn't think where. The boy wasn't familiar to me, just the father.
Lying there in the dark it struck me that what was remarkable was not that the man looked familiar. I see people every day whom I sense I've seen before, and no wonder; New York teems with people, and thousands upon thousands of them pass through my field of vision every day, on the street, down in the subway, at a ballpark or in a theater or, say, a sports arena in Queens. No, what was unusual was not the sense of recognition but the urgency of the whole thing. For some reason I evidently felt it was very important that I place this man, that I figure out who he was and how I knew him.
Sitting there, his arm around the boy, his hand gripping the kid's shoulder, his other hand pointing at this and at that as he explained the ring action. And then another image, the hand moving to the boy's forehead, moving to smooth the light brown hair.
I focused on the image, wondering what could invest it with such urgency, and my mind fastened on it and then wandered down some other corridor, and I slept.
I awoke a few hours later when a garbage-collection crew made a noisy job of picking up at the restaurant next door. I used the bathroom and came back to bed. Images flickered in my mind's eye. The placard girl, tossing her head, straightening her shoulders. The father, his face animated. The hand on the boy's forehead. The girl. The father. The girl. The hand moving, smoothing the hair-
Christ!
I sat up. My heart was pounding, my mouth dry. I had trouble catching my breath.
I reached over, switched on the bedside lamp. I looked at the clock. It was a quarter to four, but I was done sleeping for the night.
Chapter 5
Six months earlier, on an oppressively hot Tuesday night around the middle of July, I was at my regular evening meeting in the basement of St. Paul's. I know it was a Tuesday because I had undertaken a six-month commitment to help stack the chairs after the Tuesday meetings. The theory holds that service of that sort helps you keep sober. I don't know about that. My own feeling is that not drinking keeps you sober, but stacking chairs probably doesn't do any harm. It's hard to pick up a drink while you've got a chair in each hand.
I don't remember anything specific about the meeting itself, but during the break a fellow named Will came up to me and said he'd like to talk with me after the meeting. I said that would be fine, but I wouldn't be able to leave right away, that I had to hang around for a few minutes to put the chairs away.
The meeting resumed, ending at ten o'clock with the Lord's Prayer, and the cleanup went quicker than usual because Will gave me a hand with the chairs. When we were done I asked him if he wanted to go someplace for coffee.
"No, I have to get home," he said. "This won't take that long, anyway. You're a detective, right?"
"More or less."
"And you used to be a cop. I heard you qualify when I was a month or so sober. Look, would you do me a favor? Would you take a look at this?"
He handed me a brown paper bag folded to make a compact parcel. I opened it and took out a videocassette in one of those semi-rigid translucent plastic cases the rental shops use. The label identified the picture as The Dirty Dozen.
I looked at it and then at Will. He was around forty, and he did some sort of work that involved computers. He was sober six months at the time, he'd come in right after the Christmas holidays, and I'd heard him qualify once. I knew his drinking story but not much about his personal life.
"I know the movie," I said. "I must have seen it four or five times."
"You've never seen this version."
"How is it different?"
"Just take my word for it. Or rather don't take my word, take the film home and look at it. You have a VCR, don't you?"
"No."
"Oh," he said, and he looked lost.
"If you could tell me what's so special about the movie-"
"No, I don't want to say anything, I want you to see it without any preconceptions. Shit." I gave him time to sort it out. "I'd say to come over to my apartment but I really can't do that tonight. Do you know anybody who has a VCR you could use?"
"I can think of someone."
"Great. Will you look at it, Matt? And I'll be here tomorrow night, and we can talk about it then."
"You want me to look at it tonight?"
"Could you do that?"
"Well," I said, "I'll try."
I had planned on joining the crowd at the Flame for coffee, but instead I went back to my hotel and called Elaine. "If this doesn't work just say so," I said, "but a fellow just gave me a movie and said I had to watch it tonight."
"Somebody gave you a movie?"
"You know, a cassette."
"Oh, I get it. And you want to watch it on my whatchamacallit."
"Right."
"My VCR."
"If you're sure you don't mind."
"I can stand it if you can. The only thing is I'm a mess, I don't have makeup on."
"I didn't know you wore makeup," I said.
"Is that right?"
"I thought that was natural beauty."
"Oh, boy," she said. "Some detective."
"I'll be right over."
"The hell you will," she said. "You'll give me fifteen minutes to gild the lily or I'll tell the doorman to throw you out on your ass."
* * *
IT was more like half an hour by the time I walked over there. Elaine lives on East Fifty-first Street between First and Second Avenues. Her apartment is on the sixteenth floor, and from her living-room window you can look out across the East River at a fairly panoramic view of the borough of Queens. I suppose you could see Maspeth if you knew where to look for it.
She owns her apartment. The building went co-op a few years ago and she bought it. She also owns a fair amount of rental property, two-family houses and apartment buildings, some but not all of them in Queens. She has other investments as well, and she could probably live decently off her investment income if she were to retire from her profession. But she hasn't chosen to do so, not yet.
She's a call girl. We met years ago, when I was a cop with a gold shield in my wallet and a house and a wife and kids in Syosset, which is far out on Long Island on the other side of Queens, much too remote to be seen from Elaine's window. She and I developed a relationship based, I suppose, on mutual need, which may be the basis of most if not all relationships, if you look deeply enough.
We did things for each other. I did for her the things a cop could do for someone in her position- warned off a predatory pimp, put the fear of God into a drunk client who was giving her a hard time, and, when another client was ungracious enough to drop dead in her bed, I dumped the body where it would do no harm to his reputation, or to hers. I did cop things for her and she did call-girl things for me, and it lasted for a surprisingly long time because we genuinely liked each other.
Then I stopped being a cop, gave up the detective's gold shield about the same time I let go of the house and the wife and the kids. Elaine and I rarely saw anything of each other. We might have lost track of each other altogether if either of us had moved, but we both stayed put. My drinking got worse, and finally after a few trips to detox I began to get the hang of not drinking.
I had been doing that for a couple of years, a day at a time, and then one day some trouble came at Elaine out of the past. It came specifically from a part of the past we had shared, and it wasn't just her trouble, it belonged to both of us. Dealing with it brought us together again, though it was hard to say just what that meant. She was, certainly, a very close friend. She was also the only person I saw with any frequency with whom I had a history, and for that reason alone she was important to me.
She was also the person I was sleeping with two or three nights a week, and just what that meant and just where it was going was beyond me. When I talked about it with Jim Faber, my AA sponsor, he told me to take it a day at a time. If you make it a habit to give advice like that in AA, before you know it you have a reputation as a sage.
THE doorman called upstairs on the intercom, pointed me to the elevator. Elaine was waiting in the doorway, her hair in a ponytail, wearing hot-pink pedal pushers and a lime-green sleeveless blouse with the top buttons unbuttoned. She sported oversized gold hoop earrings and enough makeup to look marginally sluttish, which was an effect she never achieved unintentionally.
I said, "See? Natural beauty."
"So glad you appreciate it, meestair."
"It's that simple unspoiled look that gets me every time."
I followed her inside and she took the cassette from me. "The Dirty Dozen," she read. "This is the movie you absolutely positively have to see tonight?"
"So I'm told."
"Lee Marvin against the Nazis? That Dirty Dozen? You could have told me and I could have run down the whole plot for you over the phone. I saw it when it first came out and I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen it on television. Everybody's in it, Lee Marvin, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, and what's his name, he was in M*A*S*H-"
"Alan Alda?"
"No, the movie M*A*S*H, and not Elliott Gould, the other one. Donald Sutherland."
"Right, and Trini Lopez."
"I forgot about Trini Lopez. He gets killed right away when they parachute in."
"Don't spoil it for me."
"Very funny. Robert Ryan's in it, isn't he? And Robert Webber, he died just recently, he was such a good actor."
"I know Robert Ryan's dead."
"Robert Ryan died years ago. They're both gone, both Roberts. You've seen this movie, haven't you? Of course you have, everybody has."
"Time and time again."
"So why do you have to see it now? Business?"
I wondered myself. Will had made sure I was a detective before handing it to me. "Possibly," I said.
"Some business. I wish I got paid to watch old movies."
"Do you? I wish I got paid to screw."
"Nice, very nice. Be careful what you pray for. You're really gonna watch this or is that a gun in your pocket?"
"Huh?"
"Mae West. Forget it. Can I watch with you, or will that impede your concentration?"
"You're welcome to watch," I said, "but I'm not sure what we're going to be watching."
"The Dirty Dozen, n'est-ce pas? Isn't that what it says on the label?" She slapped herself on the forehead, Peter Falk's Columbo pretending to be struck by the obvious. "Counterfeit labels," she said. "You're doing more trademark-infringement work, right?"
I had been working per diem for a large investigations agency, hassling street vendors for selling Batman knock-offs, T-shirts and visors and such. Decent pay, but it was mean work, rousting new arrivals from Dakar and Karachi who didn't have a clue what they were doing wrong, and I hadn't had the heart for it. "I don't think that's exactly it," I said.
"Copyright, I mean. Somebody knocked off the packaging and stuck it on a bootleg tape. Am I right?"