Out on the Cutting Edge

Page 30

My coffee cup was empty. I left Ballou at the table and took my cup to the bar and let the barman fill it up again. Crossing the floor, I fancied the sawdust underfoot was blood-soaked. I thought I could see it and smell it. But it was just spilled beer that I was seeing, and the smell was the meat smell from the street outside.
When I got back Ballou was looking at the picture I'd given him. "She was a pretty girl," he said evenly. "Prettier than you'd know from her picture. Lively, she was."
"Until he killed her."
"Until then."
"He left her there? I'll want to get the body, arrange to ship it back to them."
"You can't."
"There'd be a way to do it without opening an investigation. I think her parents would cooperate if I explained it to them. Especially if I could tell them that justice had been done." The phrase sounded stilted, but it said what I wanted to say. I glanced at him. "It has been done, hasn't it?"
He said, "Justice? Is justice ever done?" He frowned, following the thought through the fumes of his whiskey. "The answer to your question," he said, "is yes."
"I thought so. But the body-"
"You can't take it, man."
"Why not? Wouldn't he say where he buried it?"
"He never buried her." His hand, resting on the table between us, tightened into a fist. His fingers went white at the knuckles.
I waited.
He said. "I told you about the farm. All it's supposed to be is a place in the country, but the two of them, O'Mara's their name, they like to farm it. She has a garden, and all summer long they're giving me corn and tomatoes. And zucchini, they're always after me to take zucchini." He opened his fist, spread his hand palm-down on the tabletop. "He has a dairy herd, two dozen head. Holsteins, they are. He sells the milk and keeps what it brings him. They try to give me milk, but what do I want with it? The eggs, though, are the best you'll ever have. They're free range chickens. Do you know what that means? It means they have to scratch for a living. Christ, I'd say it does them good. The yolks are deep yellow, close to orange. Someday I'll bring you some of those eggs."
I didn't say anything.
"He keeps hogs there, too."
I took a sip of my coffee. For a moment I tasted bourbon in it, and I thought he might have added it to my cup while I was away from the table. But of course that was nonsense, I'd had the cup with me, and the bottle on the table held Irish whiskey, not bourbon. But I used to take my coffee that way, and my memory was pitching me curves and sliders, showing me blood on the sawdust underfoot, putting a bourbon taste in my coffee.
He said, "Every year there are farmers who pass out drunk in the hog pen, or fall and knock themselves out, and do you know what happens to them?"
"Tell me."
"The hogs eat them. Hogs will do that. There's men in the country who advertise that they'll pick up dead cows and horses, dispose of them for you. A hog needs a certain amount of animal matter in his diet, you see. He craves it, thrives better if he has it."
"And Paula-"
"Ah, Jesus," he said.
I wanted a drink. There are a hundred reasons why a man will want a drink, but I wanted one now for the most elementary reason of all. I didn't want to feel what I was feeling, and a voice within was telling me that I needed the drink, that I couldn't bear it without it.
But that voice is a liar. You can always bear the pain. It'll hurt, it'll burn like acid in an open wound, but you can stand it. And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.
"I believe he wanted to do it," Mickey Ballou said. "To kill her with his knife and hoist her into the pen, to stand with his arms against the rail fence and watch the swine go at her. He had no call to do it. She would have gone home where she belonged and nobody would ever have heard of her again. He might have thrown a scare into her if he had to, but he never had any call to kill her. So I have to think he did it to take delight in it."
"He's not the first."
"No," he said fervently, "and sometimes there's joy to be found in it. Have you known that joy?"
"No."
"I have," he said. He turned the bottle so that he could read the label. Without looking up he said, "But you don't kill for no good reason. You don't make up reasons to give yourself an excuse to shed blood. And you don't fucking lie about it to them you shouldn't lie to. He killed her on my fucking farm and fed her to my fucking hogs, and then he let me go on thinking she was baking cookies in her mother's kitchen in fucking Muncie, Indiana."
"You picked him up at the bar last night."
"I did."
"And drove up to Ulster County, I think you said. To the farm."
"Yes."
"And you were up all night."
"I was. It's a long drive there and a long drive back, and I wanted to get to mass this morning."
"The butchers' mass."
"The butchers' mass," he agreed.
"It must have been tiring," I said. "Driving all the way there and back, and I suppose you'd been drinking."
"I had for a fact, and it's true it was a tiring drive. But, you know, there's no traffic at that hour."
"That's true."
"And on the way up," he said, "I had him along for company."
"And on the way back?"
"I played the radio."
"I suppose that helped."
"It did," he said. "It's a wonderful radio they put in a Cadillac. Speakers front and back, the sound as clear as good whiskey. You know, hers wasn't the first body ever went in that hog pen."
"Nor the last?"
He nodded, lips set, eyes like green flint. "Nor the last," he said.
We left the meat market bar and walked over Thirteenth to Greenwich Street, then up to Fourteenth and east to where he'd left the car. He wanted to give me a ride uptown but I wasn't going that way, and I told him it was easier for me to take the subway than for him to fight the traffic in lower Manhattan. We stood there for a moment. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and walked around his car to the driv-er's side, and I headed off toward Eighth Avenue and the subway.
I rode downtown, and after I got off the first thing I did was look for a telephone. I didn't want to call from a booth on the street. I found one in the lobby of an office building. It even had a door you could draw shut, unlike the open-air booths they have outside.
I called Willa first. We went through the hellos and the how are yous, and I cut into the middle of a sentence of hers and said, "Paula Hoeldtke's dead."
"Oh. You suspected that."
"And now I've confirmed it."
"Do you know how it happened?"
"I know more than I want to know. I don't want to go into it over the phone. Anyway, I have to call her father."
"I don't envy you that."
"No," I said. "And I have other things to do, but I'd like to see you later. I don't know how long I'll be. Suppose I come by around five or six?"
"I'll be here."
I hung up and sat in the booth for a few minutes. The air got close and I cracked the door. Then after a while I closed it again and the little light came on overhead and I lifted the receiver and dialed 0 and 317 and the rest of his number, and when the operator came on I gave her his name and my name and told her I wanted to make a collect call.
When I had him on the line I said, "It's Scudder. I spent a long time getting nowhere and then things loosened up all of a sudden. I don't have everything yet, but I thought I'd better call you. It doesn't look good."
"I see."
"In fact it looks pretty bad, Mr. Hoeldtke."
"Well, I was afraid of that," he said. "My wife and I, that's what we were afraid of."
"I should know more later today, or possibly tomorrow. I'll call you then. But I know you and Mrs. Hoeldtke have been sitting around hoping for good news, and I wanted to tell you, well, that there isn't going to be any."
"I appreciate that," he said. "I'll be here until six, and then I'll be home all evening."
"You'll hear from me."
I spent the next several hours going in and out of a bunch of offices. The information I wanted was mostly available, but I had to shell out a few dollars here and there in order to get my hands on it. New York is like that, and a sizable percentage of the people who work for the local government regard their salaries as a sort of base they get in return for reporting to work every morning. If they actually do anything, they expect to be paid extra for it. Elevator inspectors expect a bribe to certify that an elevator is safe. Other functionaries expect payment before they'll issue a building permit, or overlook a real or imagined restaurant violation, or otherwise do the job they've been hired to do. It must baffle people from out of town, although those who've lived in Arab countries probably find it familiar and comprehensible.
The favors I wanted were routine, and the baksheesh required was normal. I paid out around fifty dollars, maybe a few dollars more than that. And, gradually, I began to learn what I needed to know.
Just before noon I called the AA Intergroup number and told the volunteer who answered that I didn't have my meeting book with me and needed a lunchtime meeting near City Hall. He gave me an address on Chambers Street and I got there while they were reading the preamble. I sat there for the rest of the hour. I don't know if I heard a word anybody said, and I didn't contribute anything myself beyond the physical fact of my presence and the dollar I put in the basket, but I left the room glad I'd come to it.
I had a hamburger and a glass of milk after the meeting and went to some more offices and bribed some more municipal employees. It was raining when I left the last office and walked to the subway, and it was clear when I got out at Fiftieth Street and walked up to Midtown North.
I got there around three-thirty. Joe Durkin was out. I said I'd wait for him, and I said that if he called in they should tell him I was waiting, and that it was important. Evidently he did, and got the message, because when he breezed in forty-five minutes later the first thing he did was ask what was so important.
"Everything's important," I said. "You know what my time is worth."
"About a buck an hour, isn't it?"
"Sometimes even more."
"I can't wait until I got my twenty years in," he said. "Then I can move into the private sector and start knocking down those big bucks."
We went upstairs and sat at his desk. I took out a slip of paper with a name and address and set it down in front of him. He looked at it, then at me, and said, "So?"
"Victim of a burglary and homicide."
"I know," he said. "I remember the case. We closed it."
"You got the guy?"
"No, but we know who did it. Twitchy little junkie, pulled a lot of jobs the same way, over the rooftops and down the fire escapes. We couldn't make a case against him for this one, but we hung a batch of other ones on him where we had good hard evidence. His Legal Aid lawyer plea-bargained him, but he still went away for- I don't know, a few years. I could look it up."