'Not that I ever heard of.'
'Prostitution? White slaving?'
'Not his style.' He yawned, ran a hand through his hair. 'There was another one they called Butcher. A mob guy, out in Brooklyn if I remember it right.'
'Dom the Butcher.'
'That's the one.'
'Bensonhurst.'
'Yeah, right. Under Carlo G., if I remember it right. And they called him the Butcher because he had some kind of no-show job in the meatcutter's union, that's what he paid his taxes on. Dominic something or other, I forget his last name. Something Italian.'
'No kidding.'
'Somebody shot him a couple of years ago. His line of work, you call that dying of natural causes. The thing is, they called him the Butcher because of his cover job, but all the same he was a brutal bastard.
There was a story, some kids robbed a church and he had 'em skinned alive.'
'To teach respect for the cloth.'
'Yeah, well, he must have been a deeply spiritual guy. All I'm getting at, Matt, is when you got a guy they call the Butcher, or the Butcher Boy, or whatever the fuck they call him, you're talking about an animal oughta be in a cage, you're talking about the kind of guy eats raw meat for breakfast.'
'I know.'
'What I'd do in your position,' he said, 'is I'd take the biggest gun I could find, and right away I'd shoot him in the back of the neck. Either that or I'd stay the fuck away from him.'
The Mets were back home for a weekend series with the Pirates.
They'd won last night and it didn't look as though anyone was going to catch them. I called Willa but she had chores to do and wasn't enough of a fan to shirk them. Jim Faber was at his shop, with a job he'd promised a client by six. I flipped through my book and called a couple of other fellows I knew from St. Paul's, but either they weren't home or they didn't feel like shlepping out to Shea.
I could just stay home. The game would be televised, NBC was carrying it as the game of the week. But I didn't want to sit around all day. I had things to do and I couldn't do them. Some of them had to wait until dark, and some until after the weekend, and I wanted to get up and go somewhere in the meantime, not sit around looking at my watch. I tried to think who to go to the game with, and I could only come up with two people.
First was Ballou, and I had to laugh at myself for thinking of him. I didn't have a number for him, and wouldn't have called it if I had. He probably didn't like baseball. Even if he did, I somehow couldn't see the two of us palling around, eating hot dogs and booing a bad call at first base. It just showed how strong if illusory the bond between us had been the previous evening for me to have thought of him at all.
The other person was Jan Keane. I didn't have to look up her number, and I dialed it and let it ring twice, then rang off before either she or her machine could answer.
I rode the subway down to Times Square, switched to the Flushing line and rode all the way out to Shea. The cashiers were sold out, but there were plenty of kids out front with tickets to sell, and I got a decent seat, up high behind third base. Ojeda pitched a three-hit shutout and for a change the team got him some runs, and the weather was just the way it ought to be. The new kid, Jefferies, went four-for-five with a double and a home run, and he went to his left for a low liner off Van Slyke's bat and saved Ojeda's shutout for him.
The fellow on my right said he'd seen Willie Mays in his rookie season at the Polo Grounds, and he'd been exciting in the same way.
He'd come by himself, too, and he had a lot to say over nine innings, but it was better than sitting home and listening to Scully and Garagiola and Bud Light commercials. The fellow on my left had a beer each inning until they stopped selling it in the seventh. He had an extra in the fourth, too, to make up for the half of one that he spilled on his shoes and mine.
I was annoyed at having to sit there and smell it, and then I reminded myself that I had a lady friend who generally smelled of beer when she didn't smell of scotch, and that I'd spent the previous night voluntarily breathing stale beer fumes in a lowlife saloon and had a grand time of it.
So I had no real reason to sulk if my neighbor wanted to sink a few while he watched the home team win one.
I had a couple of hot dogs myself, and drank a root beer, and stood up for the national anthem and the seventh-inning stretch, and to give Ojeda a hand when he got the last Pirate to swing at a curveball low and away. 'They'll roll right over the Dodgers in the playoffs,' my new friend assured me. 'But I don't know about Oakland.'
I'd made a dinner date with Willa earlier. I stopped at my hotel to shave and put on a suit, then went over to her place. She had her hair braided again, and the braid coiled across her forehead like a tiara. I told her how nice it looked.
She still had the flowers on the kitchen table. They were past their prime, and some were losing their
petals. I mentioned this, and she said she wanted to keep them another day. 'It seems cruel to throw them out,' she said.
She tasted of booze when I kissed her, and she had a small scotch while we decided where to go. We both wanted meat, so I suggested the Slate, a steak house on Tenth Avenue that always drew a lot of cops from Midtown North and John Jay College.
We walked over there and got a table in front near the bar. I didn't see anyone I recognized, but several faces were vaguely familiar and almost every man in the room looked to be on the job. If anyone had been fool enough to hold the place up, he'd have been surrounded by men with drawn revolvers, a fair percentage of them half in the bag.
