A Dance at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page B

verbs right."
     
* * *
     
    AFTER we'd settled the tab we went over to the bar. Gary was behind it, a tall lanky man with a droll manner and a beard that hung from his lower jaw like an oriole's nest. He said it was good to see us and asked when I would have some work for him. I told him it was hard to say.
    "Once this gentleman entrusted me with a matter of grave importance," he told Elaine. "It was an undercover assignment and I acquitted myself well."
    "I'm not surprised," she said.
    I asked about Richard and Amanda Thurman. They came in occasionally, he said, sometimes with another couple, sometimes just the two of them. "He'd have a vodka mart before dinner," he said. "She'd have a glass of wine. Sometimes he'd come in by himself and have a quick beer at the bar. I don't remember the brand. Bud Light, Coors Light. Something light."
    "Has he been in since the murder?"
    "Only once that I saw him. A week, two weeks ago, he and another fellow came in and had dinner one night. That's the only time I've seen him since it happened. He lives very near here, you know."
    "I know."
    "Just halfway down the block." He leaned over the bar, dropped his voice. "What's the story? Is there a suspicion of foul play?"
    "There'd have to be, don't you think? The woman was raped and strangled."
    "You know what I mean. Did he do it?"
    "What do you think? Does he look like a killer to you?"
    "I've been in New York too long," he said. "Everybody looks like a killer to me."
     
* * *
     
    ON our way out Elaine said, "You know who might like to go to the fights tomorrow? Mick Ballou."
    "He might at that. You want to stop at Grogan's for a minute?"
    "Sure," she said. "I like Mick."
    He was there, and glad to see us, and enthusiastic at the idea of driving out to Maspeth to watch grown men stand around hitting each other. We didn't stay long at Grogan's, and when we left I flagged a cab, so we didn't walk past the building where Amanda Thurman had died, to her husband's horror or with his complicity.
    I stayed the night at Elaine's apartment, and I spent the next day starting to poke into the corners of Richard Thurman's life. I was back at my hotel in time to watch the five o'clock news on CNN. Then I took a shower and got dressed, and when I went downstairs Mick's silver Cadillac was parked out front next to a fire hydrant.
    "Maspeth," he said. I asked him if he knew how to get there. "I do," he said. "There was a man who had a factory out there, a Romanian Jew he was. He had a dozen women working for him, putting together bits of metal and plastic, making staple removers."
    "What's that?"
    "Say you've stapled some papers together and you want to take them apart. You take one of his things and it nips the staple and draws it right out. He had some women assembling the creatures and others packing them a dozen to a box and shipping them all over the country." He sighed. "He was a gambler, though, and he borrowed money and couldn't pay it back."
    "What happened?"
    "Ah, that's a long story," he said. "I'll have to tell it to you one of these days."
    NOW, five hours later, we were heading back to Manhattan on the Queensboro Bridge. He hadn't said anything more about the factory owner in Maspeth. Instead, I was telling him about the Cable TV executive.
    He said, "The things people do to each other."
    He had done his share. One of the things he'd done, according to neighborhood legend, was kill a man named Farrelly and carry his head around in a bowling bag, lugging it in and out of a dozen Hell's Kitchen saloons. Some people said he never opened the bag, just told everybody what it contained, but there were others who swore they'd been there to see him haul out the head by the hair, saying, "Will you look at poor Paddy Farrelly? And isn't he the ugliest bastard you ever saw?"
    In the newspapers they say he's known as the Butcher Boy, but it's only the newspapers that call him that, just as no one but a ring announcer ever called Eldon Rasheed the