A Dance at the Slaughter House

Monday morning I walked over to Midtown North. I had called ahead, so Durkin was expecting me. I had my notebook with me, as I almost always do. I had the videocassette of The Dirty Dozen, too. I had taken it with me when I left Elaine's the day before.

He said, "Sit down. You want some coffee?"

"I just had some."

"I wish I could say the same. What's on your mind?"

"Bergen Stettner."

"Yeah, well, I can't say I'm surprised. You're like a dog with a bone. What have you got?"

I handed him the cassette.

"Great picture," he said. "So?"

"This version is a little different from the way you may remember it. The highlight comes when Bergen and Olga Stettner commit murder on-camera."

"What are you talking about?"

"Someone dubbed another tape onto this cassette. After fifteen minutes of Lee Marvin we cut to amateur home video. Bergen and Olga and a friend, but by the time the movie is over the friend is dead."

He picked up the cassette, weighed it in his hand. "You're saying you've got a snuff film here."

"A snuff tape, anyway."

"And it's the Stettners? How in hell-"

"It's a long story."

"I got time."

"It's complicated, too."

"Well, it's good you caught me early in the day," he said. "While my mind's still fresh."

I must have talked for an hour. I told it from the beginning, with Will Haberman's panicky request that I scan the tape, and I went through the whole thing and didn't leave out anything important. Durkin had a spiral notebook on his desk, and early on he flipped it open to a clean page and began jotting things down. He would interrupt me from time to time to clarify a point, but for the most part he just let me tell it my way.

When I was done he said, "It's funny how it all fits together. If your friend doesn't happen to be the one who rents the tape, and if he doesn't happen to run to you with it, then there's never anything ties Thurman and Stettner together."

"And I probably don't have a wedge into Thurman," I agreed, "and he doesn't pick me to spill his guts to. The night I met him in Paris Green I was just fishing, I didn't really seem to be getting anywhere with him. I thought he might know Stettner because of the connection through Five Borough Cable, and because I'd seen them both at the New Maspeth Arena. I showed him the sketch just to shove him off-balance a little, and that was what got things going."

"And sent him out a window."

"But it was a coincidence that was trying to happen," I said. "I was almost involved in the whole thing before Haberman rented the tape. A friend of mine mentioned my name when Leveque was looking for a private detective. If he'd called me then he might never have been killed."

"Or you might have been killed with him." He passed the cassette from one hand to the other as if he wished someone would take it away from him. "I guess I have to look at this," he said. "There's a VCR in the lounge, if we can pry it away from the old hairbags who sit around all day watching Debbie do Dallas." He stood up. "Watch it with me, okay? I miss any of the subtleties, you can point 'em out to me."

The lounge was empty, and he hung a sign on the door to keep anybody from walking in on us. We fast-forwarded through the opening of The Dirty Dozen, and then the Stettners' home movie came on. At first he made cop comments, remarking on the costumes and on Olga's figure, but once the action was under way he fell silent. The movie had that effect. Nothing you could say was a match for what you were seeing.

While it was rewinding he said, "Jesus."

"Yeah."

"Tell me one more time about the kid they did. You said his name was Bobby?"

"Happy," I said. "Bobby was the younger one, the other sketch I gave you."

"Bobby's the one you saw at the fight. You never saw Happy?"

"No."

"No, of course not. How could you? He's already dead before you see the cassette, before Leveque gets killed, even. This is complicated, but you said it was, didn't you?" He got out a cigarette and tapped the end against the back of his hand. "I got to run this past some people. Upstairs, and most likely at the Manhattan DA's Office. This is very tricky."

"I know."

"Let me keep all of this, Matt. You'll be at the same number? The hotel?"

"I should be in and out the rest of the day."

"Yeah, well, don't be surprised if you don't hear anything today. Tomorrow's more likely, or it could even be Wednesday. I got other cases I'm supposed to be working, far as that goes, but I'm gonna move on this right away." He retrieved the cassette from the machine. "This is something," he said. "You ever see anything like this before?"

"No."

"I hate the shit you have to look at. When I was a kid, looking at the TPF guys up on top of their horses, you know, I had no idea."

"I know."

"No fucking idea at all," he said. "None."

I didn't hear from him until Wednesday evening. I was at St. Paul's until ten o'clock, and when I got back to the hotel there were two messages. The first one, logged in at a quarter to nine, requested that I call him at the station house. He'd called again three-quarters of an hour later to leave a number I didn't recognize.

I made the call and asked the man who answered for Joe Durkin. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand but I could hear him call the name: "Joe Durkin? There a Joe Durkin here?" There was a pause, and then Joe came on the line.

"You keep late hours," I said.

"Yeah, well, I'm not on the city's time now. Listen, you got a few minutes? I want to talk with you."

"Sure."

"Come over here, huh? Where the hell is this place, anyway? Hold on a minute." He came back and said, "Name of the place is Pete's All-American, it's on-"

"I know where it is. Jesus."

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing at all," I said. "Is a sport jacket and tie all right or will I need a suit?"

"Don't be a wiseass."

"All right."

"The place is a little lowdown. You got a problem with that?"

"No problem."

"I'm in a lowdown mood. Where am I gonna go, the Carlyle? The Rainbow Room?"

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

Pete's All-American is on the west side of Tenth Avenue a block up from Grogan's. It's been there for generations but remains an unlikely candidate for the National Register of Historic Places. It has never been anything but a bucket of blood.

It smelled of stale beer and bad plumbing. The bartender looked up without interest when I came in the door. The half-dozen old lags at the bar didn't bother to turn around. I walked past them to a table in back where Joe was sitting with his back to the wall. There was an overflowing ashtray on the table, along with a rocks glass and a bottle of Hiram Walker Ten High. They aren't supposed to bring the bottle to the table like that, it's a violation of an SLA rule, but a lot of people will bend the rules for somebody who shows them a gold shield.

"You found the joint," he said. "Get yourself a glass."

"That's all right."

"Oh, right, you don't drink. Never touch the dirty stuff." He picked up his glass, drank some, made a face. "You want a Coke or something? You gotta get it yourself, they're not big on service here."

"Maybe later."

"Sit down then." He ground out his cigarette. "Jesus Christ, Matt. Jesus Christ."

"What's the matter?"

"Ah, shit," he said. He reached down beside him, came up with the videocassette and tossed it onto the table. It skidded off and landed in my lap. "Don't drop that," he said. "I had a hell of a time getting it back. They didn't want to give it to me. They wanted to keep it."

"What happened?"

"But I pitched a bitch," he went on. "I said, hey, you ain't gonna play the game, you can give back the bat and ball. They didn't like it but it was easier to give it to me than to put up with all the hell I was raising." He drained his glass and banged it down on the tabletop. "You can forget about Stettner. There's no case."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean there's no case. I talked to cops, I talked to an ADA. You got a whole batch of different things and they don't add up to dick."

"One thing you've got," I said, "is a visual record of two people committing murder."

"Yeah," he said. "Right. That's what I saw and that's what I can't get out of my fucking head and that's why I'm drinking bad whiskey in the worst shithole in town. But what does it really amount to? He's got a hood covers most of his face and she's got a fucking mask. Who are they? You say it's Bergen and Olga and I say you're probably right, but can you imagine putting the two of them in the dock and making a jury watch this and trying to make an identification on that basis? 'Bailiff, will you please remove the female defendant's dress so the jury can get a good look at her tits, see if they match the set in the movie?' Because the tits are all you really get a good look at."

"You get to see her mouth."

"Yeah, and there's generally something in it. Look, here's the point. Odds are you could never get the tape seen by a jury. Any defense attorney's gonna try and get it disallowed, and they most likely could, because it's inflammatory. I'll fucking well say it's inflammatory. It inflamed the shit out of me, it made me want to jail those two fuckers and weld the cell door shut."

"But a jury can't see it."

"Probably not, but before it gets that far they tell me you can't even get an indictment, because what have you got to present to a grand jury? First off, who was murdered?"

"A kid."

"A kid we don't know zip about. Maybe his name is Happy and maybe he comes from Texas or South Carolina or some state where they play a lot of high school football. Where's the body? Nobody knows. When did the alleged homicide take place? Nobody knows. Did he really get killed? Nobody knows."

"You saw it, Joe."

"I see stuff on TV and in the movies all the time. Special effects, they call it. They got these hero killers, Jason, Freddie, they're in one movie after another, wasting people left and right. I'll tell you, they make it look as good as Bergen and Olga."

"There were no special effects in what we saw. That was home video."

"I know that. I also know that the tape doesn't amount to evidentiary proof that a murder was committed, and that without the where and the when and some proof that somebody actually got killed, you got next to nothing to walk into a courtroom with."

"What about Leveque?"

"What about him?"

"His murder's a matter of record."

"So? There is nothing anywhere to link Arnold Leveque to either of the Stettners. The only tie is the unsupported testimony of Richard Thurman, who's conveniently dead himself and who told you this in a private conversation with no witnesses present, and it's all hearsay and almost certainly not allowable. And not even Thurman could connect the Stettners to the film. He said Leveque was trying to blackmail Stettner with a film, but he also said Stettner got that film and that was the end of it. You can be positive in your own mind that we're talking about the same film here, and you can work it out that Leveque was the cameraman and was there when the kid's blood went down the drain, but that's not proof. You couldn't even say it in court without some lawyer jumping straight down your throat."