A Dance at the Slaughter House

"Better than I expected. How was your class?"



"Great, but there's a ton of stuff I've got to read. And there's one little airhead in the class who gets her hand up every time the instructor comes to the end of a sentence. If he doesn't find a way to shut her up I may have to kill her."



I asked if I could come over. "I'd like to use your VCR for about an hour," I said.



"That's fine," she said, "if you come over right away, and if it's really not much more than an hour. And if it's more fun than the last cassette you brought me."



"I'll be right over," I said.



I hung up and stepped to the curb and caught a cab right away. When I got there she took my coat and said, "Well, how did it go last night? Did you see the killer?" I must have stared, and she said, "Richard Thurman. Wasn't he supposed to be there? Isn't that why you went to Maspeth?"



"I wasn't thinking about him. He was there, yes, but I'm no closer to knowing if he killed her. I think I saw another killer."



"Oh?"



"The man in the rubber suit. I saw a man and I think it was him."



"Was he wearing the same outfit?"



"He was wearing a blue blazer." I told her about the man, and the boy he'd had with him. "So it's the same tape as last time," I said. "I don't think you'll want to watch it again."



"Not for anything. What I think I'll do, I was figuring I might do this anyway, I'll run out and buy books for my class. It shouldn't take me more than an hour. You know how to work the VCR, don't you?" I said I did. "And I'll be back in time to get ready for my appointment. I've got somebody coming at eleven-thirty."



"I'll be out of here by then."



I waited until she was out the door, then got the VCR going and fast-forwarded past the Dirty Dozen footage. She let herself back in a few minutes before eleven, almost exactly an hour after she'd left. By then I'd watched the show twice. It ran a half hour, but the second time around I'd worked the Fast Forward button, getting through it in half the time. I'd rewound the thing and was standing at the window when she came back.



She said, "I just spent a hundred dollars on books. And I couldn't find half of what's on the list."



"Couldn't you get paperbacks?"



"These are paperbacks. I don't know when I'm going to find time to read all of these." She upended the shopping bag on the couch, picked up a book and tossed it back onto the pile. "At least they're in English," she said, "which is a good thing, since I don't happen to read Spanish or Portuguese. But are you really reading something if you read it in translation?"



"If it's a good translation."



"I suppose so, but isn't it like seeing a movie with subtitles? What you're reading just isn't the same as what they're saying. Did you watch that thing?"



"Uh-huh."



"And? Was it him?"



"I think so," I said. "It would be a lot easier to say if he hadn't had that goddam hood on. He must have been sweltering in a skintight rubber suit and a rubber hood."



"Maybe the open crotch had a cooling effect."



"He looked right to me," I said. "The one gesture, his hand on the boy's hair, that's what finally rang a bell for me, but there were other points of correspondence. The way he held himself, the way he moved, these are things you can't cover up with a costume. The hands looked right. The gesture, stroking the boy's hair, that was just as I remembered it." I frowned. "I think it was the same girl, too."



"What girl? You didn't mention a girl. You mean his partner in crime, the one with the little tits?"



"I think she was the placard girl. Strutting around the ring between rounds with a sign telling what round was coming up."



"I don't suppose she was wearing her leather drag."



I shook my head. "She was dressed for the beach, showing a lot of leg. I didn't pay much attention to her."



"I'll bet."



"I mean it. There was something faintly familiar about her but I didn't study her face."



"Of course not. You were too busy looking at her ass." She put a hand on my arm. "I'd love to hear more," she said.



"But you're expecting company. I'll clear out. Do you mind if I leave the tape? I don't want to carry it around all day or make a special trip to get rid of it."



"No problem. And I hate to rush you, but-"



I gave her a kiss and left.



WHEN I got out to the street I had the urge to plant myself in a doorway and see who showed up. She hadn't come right out and said that her appointment was with a john, but neither had she said otherwise, and I had been careful not to ask. Nor did I really want to lurk in the shadows trying to spot her lunch date, and speculating just what he would have her do to earn the price of all those translations from the Spanish and Portuguese.



Sometimes it bothered me. Sometimes it didn't, and sometimes I thought that it ought to bother me more or less than it did. Someday, I thought, not for the first time, I would have to get it all sorted out.



In the meantime I walked over to Madison and took a bus thirty blocks uptown. Chance's gallery was one flight up over a shop that sold expensive clothing for children. The window featured a charming scene from Wind in the Willows, with the animals wearing the shop's fashions. Rat wore a moss-green jumper that probably cost as much as a whole shelf full of contemporary Latin American fiction.



The brass plate downstairs read, L. CHANCE COULTER/AFRICANA. I climbed a flight of carpeted stairs. The gilt-edged black lettering on the door bore the same legend, along with BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. I didn't have an appointment, but maybe I wouldn't need one. I rang, and after a moment the door was opened by Kid Bascomb. He was wearing a three-piece suit, and he smiled broadly when he saw who it was.



"Mr. Scudder!" he said. "It's good to see you. Is Mr. Coulter expecting you?"



"Not unless he has a crystal ball. I took a chance he'd be in."



"He'll be glad to see you. He's on the telephone but come right in, Mr. Scudder, and make yourself comfortable. I'll just tell him you're here."



I made my way around the room, looking at the masks and statues. I didn't know the field, but you didn't need much expertise to sense the quality of the pieces on display. I was standing in front of what the label identified as a Senufo mask from the Ivory Coast when the Kid returned to tell me that Chance would be with me in a minute. "He's on the phone with a gentleman in Antwerp," he said. "I believe that's in Belgium."



"I believe you're right. I didn't know you were working here, Kid."



"Oh, for some time now, Mr. Scudder." Last night in Maspeth I'd told him to call me Matt, but it was a lost cause. "You know I retired from the ring. I wasn't good enough."



"You were damned good."



He grinned. "Well, I met three in a row who was better. Were better. I retired, and then I looked for something to do, and Mr. Chance said to see if I liked working for him. Mr. Coulter, I mean."



It was an easy mistake for him to make. When I first met Chance that one syllable was the only name he had, and it wasn't until he went into the art business that he added an initial in front and a surname after.



"And do you like it?"



"It beats getting hit in the face. And yes, I like it very much. I'm learning things. There's never a day I don't learn something."



"I wish I could say the same," Chance said. "Matthew, it's about time you came to see me. I thought you were going to join us last night, you and your friend. We all trooped downstairs to Eldon's dressing room and when I turned around to introduce you you weren't there."



"We decided not to make a long night of it."



"And it did turn out to be a long night. Do you still have a taste for good coffee?"



"Do you still get that special blend?"



"Jamaican Blue Mountain. The price is outrageous, of course, but look around you." He indicated the masks and statues. "The price of everything is ridiculous. Black, right? Arthur, could you bring us some coffee? And then you'll want to get at those invoices."



He had first served me Jamaican coffee at his home, a converted firehouse on a quiet street in Greenpoint. His Polish neighbors thought the house belonged to a housebound retired physician named Levandowski, and that Chance was the good doctor's houseman and chauffeur. Instead Chance lived there alone in a house with a full weight gym and an eight-foot pool table and walls lined with museum-quality African art.



I asked if he still had the firehouse.



"Oh, I couldn't bear to move," he said. "I thought I'd have to sell in order to open this place, but I found a way. After all, I didn't have to purchase stock. I had a house jammed full of it."



"Do you still have a collection?"



"Better than ever. In a sense it's all my collection, and in another sense everything I have is for sale, so it's all store stock. Do you remember that Benin bronze? The queen's head?"



"With all the necklaces."



"I overpaid for her at auction, and every three months when she didn't sell I raised the price. It finally got so high somebody couldn't resist her. I hated to see her go, but then I took the money and bought something else." He took my arm. "Let me show you some things. I was in Africa for a month this spring, I spent two full weeks in Mali, in the Dogon country. A sweetly primitive people, their huts reminded me of the Anasazi dwellings at Mesa Verde. See, that piece is Dogon. Square holes for eyes, everything very straightforward and unapologetic."



"You've come a long way," I said.



"Oh, my," he said. "Haven't I just?"



When I first met Chance he was successful, but in another line of work. He had been a pimp, though hardly the traditional figure with the pink Cadillac and the floppy purple hat. He'd hired me to find out who killed one of his girls.



"I owe it all to you," he said. "You put me out of business."



That was true in a sense. By the time I'd done what he hired me to do, another of his girls was dead and the rest were off his string. "You were ready for a career change anyway," I told him. "You were having a mid-life crisis."



"Oh, I was too young for that. I'm still too young for that. Matthew? You didn't just drop in to be sociable."



"No."



"Or for the coffee."



"Or that either. There was somebody I saw at the fights last night. I thought maybe you might be able to tell me who he is."



"Somebody with me? Somebody in Rasheed's corner?"



I shook my head. "Somebody sitting first row ringside in the center section." I sketched a diagram in midair. "Here's the ring, here's where you were sitting right by the blue corner. Here's where Ballou and I were. The guy I'm interested in was sitting right about here."



"What did he look like?"



"White man, balding, say five-eleven, say a hundred and ninety pounds."



"Cruiserweight. How was he dressed?"



"Blue blazer, gray trousers. Blue polka-dot tie with large dots on it."



"The tie's the first thing that doesn't sound like everybody else. I might have noticed a tie like that, but I don't believe I ever saw it."