A Dance at the Slaughter House

Thurman didn't know what to say.

"You don't know if you should believe me. Maybe I just went back to take a piss, or to cut her loose. Do you want to go back and see for yourself?"

"No."

"Good. Because you know I always tell the truth. You're confused, you don't know how to feel about this. Relax. You didn't do anything. I did it. And she would have died anyway. No one lives forever." He reached over and took Thurman's hand in his. "We are closer than close, you and I. We are brothers in blood and semen."

IT had taken him a long time to pour the beer and now it was taking him longer to drink it. He would pick up the glass and have it halfway to his lips and set it down and resume talking. He didn't really care about the beer. He wanted to talk.

He said, "I don't know if he killed that woman. She could have been some whore hired for the occasion and he went back to pay her and let her free. Or he could have cut her throat the way he said. There's no way to know."

From that point on he was leading two lives. On the surface he was a young executive on the way up. He had a great apartment and a rich wife and a rosy future. At the same time he was living a secret life with Bergen and Olga Stettner.

"I learned to turn it on and off," he said. "Like you leave your job at the office, I left that whole side of myself for when I was with them. I saw them once, twice a week. We didn't always do anything. Sometimes we would just sit around and talk. But there was always that edge, that current flowing among us. And then I'd shut it off and go home and be a husband."

After he'd known the two of them for several months, Stettner needed his help.

"He was being blackmailed. There was a tape they had made. I don't know what was on it but it must have been bad because the cameraman kept a copy and he wanted fifty thousand dollars for it."

"Arnold Leveque," I said.

His eyes widened. "How did you know that? How much do you know?"

"I know what happened to Leveque. Did you help kill him?"

This time he got the glass to his lips. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "I swear I didn't know that was how it was going to go. He said he would pay the fifty thousand but he couldn't meet with Leveque, the man was afraid of him. It's not hard to guess why. He said it would be one payment and that would be the end of it, because the man would not be fool enough to try the same stunt twice.

"There's a Thai restaurant on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. I met Leveque there. He was this comical fat man who waddled like a windup toy. He kept telling me that he was sorry to be doing this but he really needed the money. The more he said it the more despicable he seemed.

"I gave him the briefcase full of money and let him open it. He seemed more frightened when he saw the money. I was supposed to be a lawyer, that was the story, and I was wearing a Brooks pinstripe and trying to slip legal terms into my conversation. As if it mattered.

"We made the exchange, and I told him he could retain the briefcase but I couldn't allow him to go off with it until I was assured that the cassette was the one my client wanted. 'My car's parked nearby,' I said, 'and we're just minutes from my office, and as soon as I've seen five minutes of the tape you can be on your way with the money."

He shook his head. "He could have just stood up and walked out of there," he said. "What was I going to do? But I guess he trusted me. We walked halfway to Eleventh Avenue and Bergen was waiting at the mouth of an alleyway. He was going to hit Leveque over the head and then we were going to get out of there with the money and the tape."

"But that's not what happened."

"No," he said. "Before Leveque could even react Bergen was punching him. At least that's what it looked like, but then I saw that he had a knife in his hand. He stabbed him right there on the street, then grabbed him and dragged him into the alley and told me to get the briefcase. I got it and went into the alley and he had Leveque against the brick wall and he was stabbing him. Leveque was just staring. Maybe he was already dead, I don't know. He never made a sound."

AFTERWARD they took Leveque's keys and searched his apartment, carrying off two bags full of homemade tapes. Stettner had thought Leveque would have kept a backup tape of the one he was using for blackmail, but it turned out he hadn't.

"Most of them were movies he taped off the TV," Thurman said. "Old black-and-white classics, mostly. A few were porn, and some were old TV shows." Stettner screened them himself and wound up throwing just about everything out. Thurman had never seen the tape he helped recover, the one that had cost Arnold Leveque his life.

"I saw it," I said. "It shows the two of them committing murder. Killing a boy."

"I figured that's what it was, or why would they pay that kind of money for it? But how could you have seen it?"

"Leveque had a copy that you missed. It was dubbed onto a commercial cassette."

"He had a whole lot of those," he remembered. "We didn't bother with them, we left them there. That was clever of him." He picked up his glass, put it down untouched. "Not that it did him much good."

Boys were a part of Stettner's life, and one Thurman was never interested in sharing. "I don't like homosexuals," he said flatly. "Don't care for them, never did. Amanda's brother is a homosexual. He never liked me and I never liked him, it was right out there from the jump. Stettner said he was the same way, he thought faggots were weaklings and that AIDS was the planet's way of grinding them under its heel. 'It's not a homosexual act to use these boys,' he would say. 'You take them as you take a woman, that's all. And they're so easy to get, they're all over the place begging to be taken. And no one cares. You can do as you please with them and no one cares.' "

"How did he get them?"

"I don't know. I told you, that was an area of his life I made it my business to stay out of. Sometimes I would see him with a boy. He would take up with one sometimes, the way he did with the one you saw at the fights last week. He would treat him like a son, and then one day you wouldn't see the boy anymore. And I would never ask what happened to the boy."

"But you would know."

"I wouldn't even think about it. It was none of my business, so why should I think about it?"

"But you had to know, Richard."

I hadn't called him by his first name before. Maybe that helped the words get through his armor. Something did, because he winced as if he'd taken a hard right to the heart.

"I guess he killed them," he said.

I didn't say anything.

"I guess he killed a lot of people."

"What about you?"

"I never killed anyone," he said quickly.

"You were an accessory to Leveque's murder. According to the law, you were as guilty as if you'd used the knife yourself."

"I didn't even know he was going to kill him!"

He knew, just as he had known what happened to the boys. I let it pass. "You knew he was going to commit assault and robbery," I said. "That made you a participant in felony, and that's enough to make you fully culpable if the felony results in a death. You'd be guilty of murder if Leveque had died of a heart attack. As far as the law is concerned, you're guilty."

He took a couple of deep breaths. Dully he said, "All right, I know that. You could say the same thing about the girl he went back and killed, if he killed her. I suppose I was guilty of rape. She didn't resist, but I didn't exactly have her consent." He looked at me. "I can't defend what I did. I can't justify it. I'm not going to try to say that he hypnotized me, although it was like that, it really was, the way the two of them set me up and… and just got me to do what they wanted."

"How did they do that, Richard?"

"They just-"

"How did they get you to kill your wife?"

"Oh, God," he said, and put his face in his hands.

MAYBE they had planned it from the beginning. Maybe it had been part of a secret agenda all along.

"You'd better take a shower," Olga would say. "It's time for you to go home to your little wife." Your little wife, your darling wife, your charming wife- always said with a hint of irony, a touch of mockery. You have spent an hour in the world of the brave, the bold, the reckless, the daring, she was telling him, and now you may return to the black-and-white humdrum world and the Barbie doll who shares it with you.

"A shame she has all the money," Stettner said early on. "You give all your power away when your woman has more money than you do."

At first he'd been afraid that Stettner would want Amanda sexually. He had allowed Thurman to share Olga, and would want a quid pro quo. Thurman hadn't liked the idea. He wanted to keep the two lives separate, and was relieved when the Stettners did not seem to want Amanda included in their relationship. The first meeting of all four had not been a success, and, on the two subsequent occasions when both couples had drinks and dinner together, the conversation was stilted.

It was Stettner who first suggested he increase his insurance coverage. "You have a child coming, you want to protect that child. And you should have the mother covered as well. If anything happened to her you'd have a nurse, you'd have a governess, you'd have expenses for years." And then, when the policies were in force: "You know, Richard, you're a man with a rich wife. If she died you'd be a rich man. There's an interesting distinction, don't you think?"

The idea grew gradually, little by little.

"I don't know how to explain this," he said. "It wasn't real. We would joke about it, we would think up impossibly farfetched ways to do it. 'It's a shame microwave ovens are so small,' he said. 'We could stuff Amanda in with an apple in her mouth and cook her from the inside out.' It's sickening to think of now, but then it was funny because there was no reality to it, it was a harmless joke. And, because we went on joking about it, it began to have a kind of reality.

" 'We'll do it next Thursday,' Bergen would say, and we'd plan some ridiculous black-comedy scenario, and that would be the end of it. And then when Thursday came Olga would say, 'Oh, we forgot, today was the day we were supposed to kill little Amanda.' It was a joke, a running gag.

"When I was with Amanda, when they weren't around, I was a normal happily married man. That sounds impossible, doesn't it? But it was true. I guess I must have had this idea that someday Bergen and Olga would just disappear. I don't know how I expected this to happen, whether they would get caught for some of the things they had done or whether they would just drop me or move out of the country or, I don't know. Maybe I expected them to die. And then the whole dark side of life that I was leading with them would vanish and Amanda and I would live happily ever after.

"One time, though, I was lying in bed and she was asleep next to me and I started having images of different ways of killing her. I didn't want to have those thoughts but I couldn't get them out of my head. Smothering her with a pillow, stabbing her, all sorts of murderous images. I had to go into the other room and have a couple of drinks. I wasn't afraid I would do anything, I was just upset by the thoughts.