Out on the Cutting Edge

"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.

The bar he took me to was on Washington Street at the corner of Thirteenth. The sign said bar, and if it had more of a name than that they were keeping it a secret. It was a small room, its board floor liberally strewn with sawdust. There was a sandwich menu posted, and a pot of coffee made. I was glad to see that. It was a little early in the day for Coca-Cola.

The bartender was a beefy fellow with a flattop haircut and a brushy moustache. There were three men standing at the bar, two of them in butcher's aprons, both of the aprons richly bloodstained. There were half a dozen square tables of dark wood, all of them empty. Ballou got a glass of whiskey and a cup of black coffee from the bar and led me to the table that was farthest from the door. I sat down. He started to sit, then looked at his glass and saw that it didn't hold enough. He went back to the bar and returned with the bottle. It was Jameson, but not the premium stuff he drank at his own place.

He wrapped his big hand around his glass and raised it a few inches from the tabletop in a wordless toast. I raised my coffee mug in acknowledgment. He drank half the whiskey. It might have been water for all the effect it had on him.

He said, "We have to talk."

"All right."

"You knew the minute I looked at the girl. Didn't you?"

"I knew something."

"Took me on the blind side, it did. You came in talking about poor Eddie Dunphy. And then we talked about every damned thing, didn't we?"

"Just about."

"I thought what a devious bastard you were, leading me round the barn and then dropping her picture on the table. But that wasn't it at all, was it?"

"No. I didn't have anything to connect her to you or to Neil. I was just trying to find out what was on Eddie's mind."

"And I had no reason to have my guard up. I didn't know a fucking thing about Eddie or his mind or what he might have had on it." He drank the rest of the whiskey and put the glass on the table. "Matt, I have to do this. Come into the men's room so I can be certain you're not wearing a wire."

"Jesus," I said.

"I don't want to talk around the point. I want to say whatever comes to mind and I can't do that unless I know you're clean."

The lavatory was small and dank and foul. It wouldn't hold us both comfortably, so he stood outside and held the door open. I took off my jacket and shirt and tie and lowered my trousers while he apologized for the indignity of it all. Then he held my jacket while I got dressed. I took my time getting my tie knotted right, then took my jacket from him and put it on. We went back to the table and sat down, and he poured more whiskey into his glass.

"The girl's dead," he said.

Something settled lower within me. I had known she was dead, had sensed it and reasoned it both, but evidently there had been a part of me that had gone on hoping.

I said, "When?"

"Sometime in July. I don't know the date." He gripped his glass but didn't lift it. "Before Neil came to work for me he was behind the bar at a tourist place."

"The Druid's Castle."

"You'd know that, of course. He had a racket there."

"Credit cards."

He nodded. "He came to me with it, I put him in touch with someone. There's a lot of money in it, those little plastic cards, though it's not the kind of business I care for, not for myself. You can't get your hands into it, it's moving numbers around. But it was a good thing for all concerned, and then they caught on at the restaurant and they let him go."

"That's where he met Paula."

He nodded. "She was in it with him. She would run an impression of the cards on her own machine before she took the cards to the cashier.