Out on the Cutting Edge
Page 28

"What did you say when you fired him?"
"I didn't do it, the owner did. He just told Neil it wasn't working out, and Neil didn't push it. That looked pretty much like an admission of guilt, don't you think? He'd worked here long enough so that you wouldn't fire him without telling him the reason, but he didn't want to know."
"How did Paula fit in?"
"Did she? It never occurred to me that she did. She left on her own, she wasn't fired, and I'm pretty sure she was still here after we let him go. If she was working with him- well, she could have been, but they never seemed close, you didn't see them whispering in corners. I never thought of the two of them as involved in any way. There was no gossip, and I certainly didn't pick up on anything."
Around midnight I picked up a couple containers of coffee and planted myself diagonally across the street from Grogan's. I found a doorway and sat there, drinking coffee and keeping an eye on the place. I figured I was reasonably inconspicuous there. There were a lot of guys in doorways, some of them sitting up, some lying down. I was better dressed than most of them, but not by all that much.
Time passed a little faster than when I'd stood around waiting for Gary. My mind would drift, working on a thread of the yarnball it had to grapple with, and ten or fifteen minutes would slip by before I knew it. Throughout it all I kept my eyes pointed at the entrance to Grogan's. You have to let your mind wander on a stakeout, otherwise you drive yourself crazy with boredom, but you learn to program yourself so that your eyes will bring you back to basics if they register anything you ought to be paying attention to. Now and then some-one would walk in or out of Grogan's, and that would bring me back from my reverie and I would take note of who it was.
A few minutes after one several people left at once, and moments after that the door opened to release four or five more. The only one I recognized in either batch was Andy Buckley. The door closed after the second group, and a few seconds later the overhead lights went out, leaving the place very dimly lit.
I crossed the street so that I was standing opposite the place. I could see better now, although the doorway I had to lurk in was shallower and not as comfortable. Neil looked to be moving around inside, doing whatever he did to shut the place down for the night. I drew back a little when the door opened and he dragged a Hefty bag out to the street and swung it up into a green Dumpster. Then he went back inside, and I heard the snick of the lock. It was faint, but you could hear it across the street if you were listening for it.
More time passed at a crawl. Then the door opened again and he came out. He drew the steel gates across and locked them. The saloon was still dimly illuminated inside. Evidently those lights stayed on all night for security.
When he had all the padlocks fastened I got to my feet, ready to move off after him. If he took a cab I could forget it, and if he wound up going down into the subway I would probably let him go, but I figured he was odds-on to live somewhere in the neighborhood, and if he walked home it wouldn't be terribly difficult to tag him. I hadn't been able to find him listed in the Manhattan phone book, so the easiest way to locate his residence was to let him lead me to it.
I wasn't sure how I'd play it after that. By ear, probably. Maybe I'd catch up with him on his doorstep and see if he was rattled enough to spill anything. Maybe I'd wait and try to get into his apartment when he was out of it. First, though, I'd follow him and see where he went.
Except he didn't go anywhere. He just stood there, lurking in his doorway even as I lurked in mine, drawing in his shoulders against the cold, bringing his hands to his mouth and blowing on them. It wasn't all that cold, but then he didn't have anything on over the shirt and the vest.
He lit a cigarette, smoked half of it, threw it away. It landed at the curb and sent up a little shower of sparks. As they were dying out, a car heading uptown on Tenth made a right and pulled up in front of Grogan's, blocking my view of Neil. It was a Cadillac, a long one, silver. The glass was tinted all around and I couldn't see who was driving, or how many people it held.
For a minute I expected gunshots. I thought I'd hear them, and then the car would pull away fast, and I'd see Neil clutching his middle and sinking to the pavement. But nothing like that happened. He trotted over to the car. The passenger door opened. He got in, closed the door.
The Cadillac pulled away, leaving me there.
I thought I heard the phone while I was in the shower. It was ringing when I got out. I wrapped a towel around my middle and went to answer it.
"Scudder? Mick Ballou. Did I wake you, man?"
"I was already up."
"Good man. It's early, but I have to see you. Say ten minutes? In front of your hotel?"
"Better make it twenty."
"Sooner if you can," he said. "We don't want to be late."
Late for what? I shaved quickly, put on a suit. I'd spent a restless night, dream-ridden, my dreams full of doorway stakeouts and drive-by shootings. Now it was seven-thirty in the morning and I had a date with the Butcher. Why? For what?
I tied my tie, grabbed up my keys and wallet. There was nobody waiting for me in the lobby. I went outside and saw the car at the curb, parked next to a hydrant directly in front of the hotel. The big silver Cadillac. Tinted glass all around, but I could see him behind the wheel now because he had lowered the window on the passenger side and was leaning halfway across the front seat, motioning me over.
I crossed the pavement, opened the door. He was wearing a white butcher's apron that covered him from the neck down. There were rust-colored stains on the white cotton, some of them vivid, some of them bleached and faded. I found myself wondering at the wisdom of getting into a car with a man so dressed, but there was nothing in his manner to lead me to fear that I was going to be taken for that sort of ride. His hand was out and I shook it, then got in and drew the door shut.
He pulled away from the curb, drove to the corner of Ninth and waited for the light. He asked again if he'd awakened me and I said he hadn't. "Your man at the desk said you weren't answering," he said, "but I made him ring again."
"I was in the shower."
"But you had a night's sleep?"
"A few hours."
"I never got to bed," he said. The light turned and he made a fast left in front of oncoming traffic, then had to stop for the light at Fifty-sixth. He had touched a button to raise my windshield, and I looked through tinted glass at the morning. It was an overcast day, with the threat of rain in the air, and through the dark window the sky looked ominous.
I asked where we were going.
"The butchers' mass," he said.
I though of some weird heretical rite, men in bloody aprons brandishing cleavers, a lamb sacrificed.
"At St. Bernard's. You know it?"
"Fourteenth Street?"
He nodded. "They have daily mass at seven in the main sanctuary. And then there's another mass at eight in a small room off to the left, and there's only a handful ever to come to it. My father went every morning before work. Sometimes he'd take me with him. He was a butcher, he worked in the markets down there. This was his apron."
The light turned and we cruised down the avenue. The lights were timed, and when one was out of sync he slowed, looked left and right, and sailed on through it. We caught a light we couldn't run at one of the approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel, then made them all clear to Fourteenth Street, where he hung a left turn. St. Bernard's was a third of the way down the block on the downtown side of the street. He pulled up just short of it and parked in front of a storefront funeral parlor. Signs at the curb prohibited parking during business hours.
We got out of the car and Ballou waved at someone inside the funeral parlor. Twomey & Sons, the sign said, and I suppose it was Twomey or one of his sons who waved back. I kept pace with Ballou, up the steps and through the main doors of the church.
He led me down a side aisle and into a small room on the left, where perhaps a dozen worshipers occupied three rows of folding chairs. He took a seat in the last row and motioned for me to sit next to him.
Another half-dozen people found their way into the room during the next few minutes. There were several elderly nuns in the group, a couple of older women, two men in business suits and one in olive work clothes, and four men beside Ballou in butchers' aprons.
At eight the priest entered. He looked Filipino, and his English was lightly accented. Ballou opened a book for me and showed me how to follow the service. I stood when the others stood, sat when they sat, knelt when they knelt. There was a reading from Isaiah, another from Luke.
When they gave out communion, I stayed where I was. So did Ballou. Everyone else took the wafer, except for a nun and one of the butchers.
The whole thing didn't take all that long. When it was over Ballou strode from the room and on out of the church, and I tagged along in his wake.
* * *
On the street he lit a cigarette and said, "My father went every morning before work."
"So you said."
"It was in Latin then. They took the mystery out when they put it in English. He went every morning. I wonder what he got out of it."
"What do you get out of it?"
"I don't know. I don't go that often. Maybe ten or twenty times in a year. I'll go three days in a row and then I'll stay away for a month or two." He took another drag on his cigarette and threw the butt into the street. "I don't go to confession, I don't take communion, I don't pray. Do you believe in God?"
"Sometimes."
"Sometimes. Good enough." He took my arm. "Come on," he said. "The car's all right where it is. Twomey won't let them tow it or ticket it. He knows me, and he knows the car."
"I know it, too."
"How's that?"
"I saw it last night. I copied the plate number, I was going to run it through Motor Vehicles today. Now I won't have to."
"You wouldn't have learned much," he said. "I'm not the owner. There's another name on the registration."
"There's another name on the license at Grogan's."
"There is. Where did you see the car?"
"On Fiftieth Street a little after one. Neil Tillman got into it and you drove away."
"Where were you?"
"Across the street."
"Keeping an eye out?"
"That's right."
We were walking west on Fourteenth. We crossed Hudson and Greenwich and I asked where we were going. "I was up all night," he said. "I need a drink. After a butchers' mass where would you go but a butchers' bar?" He looked over at me, and something glinted in his green eyes. "You'll likely be the only man there in a suit. Salesmen come in there, but not this early. But you'll be all right. Meatcutters are a broadminded lot. Nobody'll hold it against you."
"I'm glad to hear that."
We were in the meat district now. Markets and packing houses lined both sides of the street and men in aprons like Ballou's unloaded carcasses from big trucks and hooked them up onto the overhead racks. The raw stink of the dead meat hung in the air like smoke, overriding the burnt reek of the trucks' exhaust. Beyond, at the end of the street, you could see dark clouds lowering over the Hudson, and high-rise apartments on the Jersey side. But for these last, the whole scene looked as though it had sprung from an earlier time. The trucks should have been horse-drawn; then you'd have sworn you were in the nineteenth century.