"Well-"
"Besides," she said, "leather's neat and fur's tacky."
"Well, that settles it."
"Good. Did the husband do it?"
"I don't know. I walked past the building earlier today. I can point it out to you later, it's on our way if I walk you home. Maybe you'll pick up some vibrations, solve the case just by walking past the murder site."
"But you didn't."
"No. He had a million and a half reasons to kill her."
"A million and a half-"
"Dollars," I supplied. "Between insurance and her own holdings." I told her about the Thurmans and what I'd learned from Joe Durkin and Lyman Warriner. "I'm not sure what I can do that the police haven't already done," I said. "Just poke around, I guess. Knock on doors, talk to people. Be nice if I could find out he's been having an affair, but of course that was the first thing Durkin looked for and he couldn't turn up a thing."
"Maybe he's got a boyfriend."
"That would fit with my client's theory, but gay people have a tendency to think the whole world is gay."
"While you and I know the whole world is morose."
"Uh-huh. You want to go to Maspeth tomorrow night?"
"Speaking of what? Moroseness?"
"No, I just-"
"Or should it be morosity? Because Maspeth does sound pretty morose, although I shouldn't say that because I don't actually think I've ever been there. What's in Maspeth?" I told her and she said, "I don't like boxing much. It's not a moral issue, I don't care if two grown men want to stand around and hit each other, but I'd just as soon change the channel. Anyway, I've got a class tomorrow night."
"What is it this semester?"
"Contemporary Latin American Fiction. All the books I've been telling myself I really ought to read, and now I have to."
In the fall she'd studied urban architecture, and I'd gone with her a couple of times to look at buildings.
"You'll be missing the architecture of Maspeth," I said. "Although I haven't really got a good reason to go myself, to tell you the truth. I don't have to travel that far to get a look at him. He lives right here in the neighborhood and his office is at Forty-eighth and Sixth. I think I'm just looking for an excuse to go to the fights. If the New Maspeth Arena had squash matches instead of boxing I'd probably stay home."
"You don't like squash?"
"I like Orange Squash okay. I've never actually seen squash played, so what do I know? Maybe I'd like it."
"Maybe you would. I met a fellow once who's a nationally ranked squash player. A clinical psychologist fromSchenectady, he was in town for a tournament at the New York Athletic Club. I never saw him play, though."
"I'll let you know if I run into him in Maspeth."
"Well, you never know. It's a small world. Did you say the Thurmans lived just a block from here?"
"Half a block."
"Maybe they used to come here. MaybeGary knows them." She frowned. "Knew them. Knows him, knew her."
"Maybe. Let's ask him."
"You ask," she said. "I can't seem to get the verbs right."
AFTER we'd settled the tab we went over to the bar. Gary was behind it, a tall lanky man with a droll manner and a beard that hung from his lower jaw like an oriole's nest. He said it was good to see us and asked when I would have some work for him. I told him it was hard to say.
"Once this gentleman entrusted me with a matter of grave importance," he told Elaine. "It was an undercover assignment and I acquitted myself well."
"I'm not surprised," she said.
I asked about Richard and Amanda Thurman. They came in occasionally, he said, sometimes with another couple, sometimes just the two of them. "He'd have a vodka mart before dinner," he said. "She'd have a glass of wine. Sometimes he'd come in by himself and have a quick beer at the bar. I don't remember the brand. Bud Light, Coors Light. Something light."
"Has he been in since the murder?"
"Only once that I saw him. A week, two weeks ago, he and another fellow came in and had dinner one night. That's the only time I've seen him since it happened. He lives very near here, you know."
"I know."
"Just halfway down the block." He leaned over the bar, dropped his voice. "What's the story? Is there a suspicion of foul play?"
"There'd have to be, don't you think? The woman was raped and strangled."
"You know what I mean. Did he do it?"
"What do you think? Does he look like a killer to you?"
"I've been in New York too long," he said. "Everybody looks like a killer to me."
ON our way out Elaine said, "You know who might like to go to the fights tomorrow? Mick Ballou."
"He might at that. You want to stop at Grogan's for a minute?"
"Sure," she said. "I like Mick."
He was there, and glad to see us, and enthusiastic at the idea of driving out to Maspeth to watch grown men stand around hitting each other. We didn't stay long at Grogan's, and when we left I flagged a cab, so we didn't walk past the building where Amanda Thurman had died, to her husband's horror or with his complicity.
I stayed the night at Elaine's apartment, and I spent the next day starting to poke into the corners of Richard Thurman's life. I was back at my hotel in time to watch the five o'clock news on CNN. Then I took a shower and got dressed, and when I went downstairs Mick's silver Cadillac was parked out front next to a fire hydrant.
"Maspeth," he said. I asked him if he knew how to get there. "I do," he said. "There was a man who had a factory out there, a Romanian Jew he was. He had a dozen women working for him, putting together bits of metal and plastic, making staple removers."
"What's that?"
"Say you've stapled some papers together and you want to take them apart. You take one of his things and it nips the staple and draws it right out. He had some women assembling the creatures and others packing them a dozen to a box and shipping them all over the country." He sighed. "He was a gambler, though, and he borrowed money and couldn't pay it back."
"What happened?"
"Ah, that's a long story," he said. "I'll have to tell it to you one of these days."
NOW, five hours later, we were heading back to Manhattan on the Queensboro Bridge. He hadn't said anything more about the factory owner in Maspeth. Instead, I was telling him about the Cable TV executive.
He said, "The things people do to each other."
He had done his share. One of the things he'd done, according to neighborhood legend, was kill a man named Farrelly and carry his head around in a bowling bag, lugging it in and out of a dozen Hell's Kitchen saloons. Some people said he never opened the bag, just told everybody what it contained, but there were others who swore they'd been there to see him haul out the head by the hair, saying, "Will you look at poor Paddy Farrelly? And isn't he the ugliest bastard you ever saw?"
In the newspapers they say he's known as the Butcher Boy, but it's only the newspapers that call him that, just as no one but a ring announcer ever called Eldon Rasheed the Bulldog. The Farrelly story probably has something to do with the sobriquet, but so does the bloodstained butcher's apron Mick likes to wear.
The apron belonged to his father. The senior Ballou had come over from France and worked cutting up carcasses in the wholesale meat markets on West Fourteenth Street. Mick's mother was Irish, and he got his speech from her and his looks from the old man.
He is a big man, tall and heavily built, with a massive monolithic quality to him that suggests a prehistoric monument, a stone head from Easter Island. His own head is like a boulder, the skin scarred by acne and violence, the cheeks starting to show the broken capillaries that years of drinking will earn you. His eyes are a startling green.