Out on the Cutting Edge (23 page)

"It pretty much is."

We went over what I wanted him to do, and then I waited across the street while he ambled over to Grogan's front entrance and walked in. I stood in a doorway and waited. The minutes crawled, and I was starting to worry that something had unaccountably gone wrong, that I'd pushed him into a

dangerous situation. I was trying to decide whether I'd make things worse by going in myself. I was still mulling it over when the door swung open and he emerged. He had his hands in his pockets and he sauntered along, looking almost too carefree to be true.

I matched his pace for half a block, then crossed over to his side of the street. He said, "Do I know you? What's the password?"

"Recognize anybody?"

"Oh, no question," he said. "I wasn't that certain I'd know him again, but I took one look and knew him right off. And he knew me."

"What did he say?"

"Didn't say much of anything, just stood in front of me waiting for me to order. I didn't let on that I knew him."

"Good."

"But, see, he didn't let on that he knew me, either, but I could see he did. The way he sent little glances my way. Ha! Guilty knowledge, isn't that what they call it?"

"That's what they call it."

"It's not a bad little store. I like the tile floor and all the dark wood.

I had a bottle of Harp, and then I took a second bottle and watched two fellows shooting darts. One of them, I'm sure he must have spent a past life as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I kept thinking he was going to fall on the floor, but he never did."

"I know who you mean."

"He was drinking Guinness. That's a shade too primal a flavor for my tastebuds to come to terms with. I suppose you could mix it with orange juice." He shuddered. "I wonder what it's like to work in a place like that, where the closest you get to a mixed drink is scotch and water or the odd vodka tonic. You could live your whole life and never hear anyone order a mimosa. Or a Harvey Wallbanger. Or a hickory dickory daiquiri."

"What the hell is that?"

"You don't want to know." He shuddered again. I asked him if he'd recognized anyone else in the room.

"No," he said. "Only the bartender."

"And he was the one you saw with Paula."

"The very lad himself, as the boyos in Grogan's might put it." He mused again on the delights of working in a simple, honest bar, unadorned with potted ferns or earnest yuppies. "Of course," he reminded himself, "the tips are pretty awful."

And that reminded me. I'd set aside a bill earlier, and now I dug it out and slipped it to him.

I couldn't get him to take it. "You brought a little excitement into my life," he said. "What did it cost me, ten minutes and the price of two beers? Someday we'll sit down and you can tell me how the whole thing turns out, and I'll even let you buy the beers that night. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough. But they don't always turn out. Sometimes they just trail off."

"I'll take my chances," he said.

I killed fifteen minutes, then went back to Grogan's myself. I didn't see Mickey Ballou in the room. Andy Buckley was in the back at the dart board, and Neil was behind the bar. He was dressed as he'd been Friday night, with the leather vest over the red buffalo-plaid shirt.

I stood at the bar and ordered a glass of plain soda water. When he brought it I asked if Ballou had been around. "He looked in earlier," he said. "He might be back later on. You want me to tell him you were looking for him?"

I said it wasn't important.

He moved off to the far end of the bar. I took a sip or two of my soda water and glanced his way from time to time. Guilty knowledge, Gary had called it, and that was what it felt like. It was hard to be sure of his voice, my caller the other morning had spoken in a hoarse half-whisper, but I had to figure it was him.

I didn't know how much more I could find out. Or what I could possibly do with whatever I learned.

I must have stood there for half an hour, and he spent all that time down at the other end of the bar.

When I left, my glass of soda wasn't down more than half an inch from the top. He'd forgotten to charge me for it, and I didn't bother to leave him a tip.

The manager at the Druid's Castle said, "Oh, sure, Neil. Neil Tillman, sure. What about him?"

"He used to work here?"

"For around six months, something like that. He left sometime in the spring."

"So he would have been here the same time Paula was here."

"I think so, but I couldn't say for certain without looking it up. And the book's in the owner's office, and that's locked up right now."

"Why did he leave?"

His hesitation was brief. "People come and go," he said. "Our turnover rate would amaze you."

"Why did you let him go?"

"I didn't say we did."

"But you did, didn't you?"

He shifted uncomfortably. "I'd rather not say."

"What was his problem? Was he dealing out of the restaurant?

Stealing too much of what came in over the bar?"

"I really don't feel right talking about it. If you come back tomorrow during the day, you can probably learn what you want to know from the owner. But--"

"He's a possible suspect," I said, "in a possible homicide."

"She's dead?"

"It's beginning to look that way."

He frowned. "I really shouldn't say anything."

"You're not talking for the record. It'll just be for my own information."

"Credit cards," he said. "There was no hard evidence, that's why I didn't want to say anything. But it looked as though he was running duplicate slips with customers' cards. I don't know just what he was doing or how he was doing it, but there was something shady going on."

"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.