A Dance At The Slaughterhouse Part 23

"And Amanda was dead."

Chapter 16.

"The rest was pretty much the way we figured," I told Durkin. "They tied him up and knocked him around a little to make it look good, set the stage so it fit the profile of a bungled burglary. They walked out and went home, and he called it in an hour or so later, whenever it was. He had his story all ready. He'd had days to work it out, all the while he was telling himself it was a joke."

"And now he wants to hire you."

"He did hire me," I said. "Last night, before we parted company."

"What for?"

"He's afraid of the Stettners. Afraid they'll kill him."

"Why would they do that?"

"To cover their a.s.ses. His conscience has been bothering him."

"I should f.u.c.king hope so."

"Well, according to him, it has. He keeps having the thought that she really loved him and she was the only person who ever did or ever will."

"Only person d.a.m.n fool enough."

"And he wants to believe that she died without realizing he was a part of her murder. That she was unconscious when he had s.e.x with her, that she was either unconscious or already dead when Stettner made him strangle her."

"He wants the answer to that one, he doesn't need a detective, he needs a medium."

It was midmorning, Thursday. I had gone to Midtown North after breakfast and waited for Joe to show, and we were at his desk now. He had a cigarette going. He must have quit smoking a dozen times that I knew about. He couldn't seem to stay off it.

I said, "He thinks his conscience is showing. And he thinks Stettner doesn't need him anymore."

"How did Stettner need him in the first place, Matt? It sounds to me like he's making Stettner the heavy when he was the one using Stettner instead of the other way around. Way I figure it he got a mil and a half out of the deal, and what did Stettner get? A quick piece of a.s.s with a woman who's half-dead?"

"So far," I said, "Stettner got four hundred thousand dollars."

"I must have missed that part."

"I was just getting to it. After it was all over, after she was buried and the press coverage had died down, Stettner had a talk with him. He said their little joint venture had been a great success, but of course if it was indeed a joint venture it was only fair that the proceeds be shared jointly."

"In other words, come up with half the dough."

"That's the idea. Not the money he inherited from his wife, Stettner was willing to overlook that, but certainly the insurance proceeds. As soon as the insurance company paid up, he wanted half. It was a million with the double indemnity, since murder is accidental death-"

"Which I never understood."

"Neither did I, but I guess it's an accident from the point of view of the victim. Anyway, it came to a million tax-free, and Stettner wanted half of it. The insurance company paid up late last month, which seems pretty quick in a case like this."

"They had a guy over here," he said. "Wanted to know if Thurman was a suspect. Officially he wasn't, which is what I had to tell him. I was convinced he did it, I told you that-"

"Yes."

"- but the only motive we had was the money, and we couldn't establish any need for the money, or anybody else he was mixed up with, or any reason to kill her." He frowned. "What you've been telling me is he really didn't have a reason."

"Not the way he tells it. But the insurance company paid, and Stettner wanted his, and the way they worked it was that Thurman would turn over cash to Stettner in increments of a hundred thousand dollars that would ostensibly be used to purchase foreign currencies. The money would just go in Stettner's pocket, but Thurman would get memos of nonexistent transactions and they'd be structured in such a way that he would ultimately be able to write off most of it as losses for tax purposes. I think that may be my favorite part, Joe. Split the proceeds with your partner in crime and write it off on your taxes."

"It's not bad. He's made four of these payments?"

"At one-week intervals. The final payment's due tonight. He'll be meeting Stettner in Maspeth, he's producing a telecast at a boxing arena out there. He'll turn over a briefcase with a hundred grand in it and that'll be that."

"And then he thinks Stettner'll kill him. Because he'll have the money and he won't need Thurman anymore, and Thurman's just a loose end and is starting to develop a conscience, so why not close the account?"

"Right."

"And he wants you to protect him," he said. "Did he happen to say how?"

"We left it open. I'm meeting him this afternoon to figure all that out."

"And then you go out to whatchacallit, Maspeth?"

"Probably."

He stubbed out his cigarette. "Why you?"

"He knows me."

"He knows you? How does he know you?"

"We met in a bar."

"So you said, last night in that s.h.i.+thole your friend Ballou owns. Incidentally, I don't know what the h.e.l.l you're doing keeping company with a guy like that."

"He's a friend of mine."

"One of these days he's gonna step on his c.o.c.k and you don't want to be there when it happens. He's a good dancer, he's slippery as a f.u.c.king eel, but one of these days the Feds'll put a RICO case together and he's got free room and board in Atlanta."

" 'Mother of mercy, is this the end of RICO?' "

"Huh?"

"Nothing," I said. "It's not important. We met at Grogan's last night because we needed a quiet place to talk. The reason he called me is we ran into each other the night before in another bar, a place in his neighborhood."

"You ran into him because you're on his case. Did he know that?"

"No. He thought I was on Stettner's case."

"Why would you be on Stettner's case?"

I hadn't told him anything about the tape of Happy's murder, or about the killing of Arnold Leveque. All of that seemed extraneous. The case in Joe's open file was the murder of Amanda Thurman, and that was the case I'd been hired for and the one that looked to be breaking.

"It was a way to hook him," I said. "I'd managed to connect him with Stettner, and that turned out to be the shoe in the door. If he can hang it all on Bergen and Olga, maybe he can get off the hook himself."

"You think you can get him to come in, Matt?"

"That's what I'm hoping. That's what I'll be working on when I see him this afternoon."

"I want you wearing a wire when you see him."

"Fine."

" 'Fine.' I wish to G.o.d you'd been wearing a wire when you saw him last night. You can get lucky, a guy feels like talking, he spills his guts and feels better. Then he gets up the next morning and wonders what got into him, and for the rest of his life he never gets the urge to open up again. Why the h.e.l.l didn't you come in and get a wire before you saw him?"

"Come on," I said. "He called out of the blue at ten and wanted to meet me right away. Were you even here last night?"

"There's other people could have fitted you with a wire."

"Sure, and it only would have taken two hours and ten phone calls to clear it, and I had no realistic reason to think he was going to open up like that in the first place."

"Yeah, you're right."

"I think I can get him to come in," I said. "I think that's what he wants to do."

"That'd be nice," he said. "But if not at least he'll talk to you, and you'll be wearing a wire. You're meeting him at four? I wish it was earlier."

"He's got appointments until then."

"And business is business, right? I'll see you here at three." He stood up. "Meantime I got appointments myself."

I walked across town to Elaine's, stopping en route for flowers and a bag of Jaffa oranges. She put the flowers in water and the oranges in a large blue gla.s.s bowl and told me she was feeling a lot better. "Weak," she said, "but definitely on the mend. What about you? Are you all right?"

"Why?"

"You look drawn. Were you up again last night?"

"No, but I didn't sleep very well. The case is breaking. It ought to wrap up in a couple more hours."

"How did all that happen? It's Wednesday, isn't it? Or did I get delirious and miss a couple of days?"

"Thurman needed a confidant and I managed to be it. He was feeling pressured, partly by me, I suppose, but mostly by Stettner."

"Who's Stettner?"

"Rubber Man," I said. I gave her an abridged version of our conversation last night at Grogan's. "I was in the right place at the right time," I said. "I was lucky."

"Unlike Amanda Thurman."

"And a whole lot of other people, from the sound of it. But Amanda's the one they'll all go away for. Between Thurman's testimony and whatever physical evidence they can put together, they ought to be able to build a nice solid case."

"Then why so glum, chum? Shouldn't you be strutting around like a bantam rooster? Whatever happened to enjoying the moment of triumph?"

"I guess I'm tired."

"And what else?"

I shrugged. "I don't know," I said. "I spent a couple of hours with Thurman last night. It didn't make me like the little p.r.i.c.k but it didn't leave me ready to rejoice in his downfall, either. A week ago he looked to be some kind of cold criminal genius, and now it turns out he's just a dimwit. A couple of manipulative perverts led him around by his c.o.c.k."

"You feel sorry for him."

"I don't feel sorry for him. I think he's a manipulative b.a.s.t.a.r.d himself, he just ran into a better one in Stettner. And I'm not buying everything he told me last night. I don't think he fed me any outright lies, but I think he made himself look better than he had any right to. For one thing, I'll bet anything Amanda wasn't the first person he killed."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because Stettner's not stupid. He knew the cops would grill Thurman up one side and down the other if his wife was murdered under that sort of circ.u.mstances. Even if they didn't suspect he was involved, they'd question him repeatedly in order to get a line on the killers and not overlook any possible clue. So Stettner would have tempered him first by getting him accustomed to killing. He was there when Leveque was killed, he was an accessory, and I think there must have been times when he and one or both of the Stettners did a number on a woman and she wound up dead. That's what I would have done if I were Stettner."

"I'm glad you're not."

"And I'm not sure how much I buy of his attack of conscience," I said. "I think he's scared, I think that part's true enough. Once Stettner gets the last hundred grand from him he's got no reason to keep him alive. Unless he wants to try for the rest of the money, which is always a possibility. Maybe that's Thurman's real fear. He doesn't want to give up the rest of the money."

"He can't keep it anyway, can he? If he confesses?"

"He doesn't intend to confess."

"But I thought you said you were going to bring him in."

"I'm going to try. I'm hoping I can manipulate him the way Stettner did."

"You want me to come along and blow him?"

"I don't think that'll be necessary."

"Good."

"See," I said, "I think he's trying to manipulate me. Maybe he wants me to kill Stettner for him. That seems farfetched, but it's not out of the question. He may want my help in arranging some sort of Mexican standoff, whereby he leaves evidence and testimony that will nail Stettner in the event of his own death. If he sets that up right and Stettner knows it, then he's home free."

"But any evidence he gives you-"

"Goes straight to Joe Durkin. d.a.m.n it."

"What's the matter?"

"It's eleven-thirty and I'm not seeing him until four. I should have kept pressing him last night instead of giving him time to think it over. The problem was that he was exhausted and so was I. I thought we'd do it this morning but he went into this song and dance about his business appointments. I wanted to tell him he could afford to cancel, that he was out of business, but I couldn't do that. You know, he called me a few times yesterday afternoon and wouldn't talk."