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.
He is a hard drinker, a career criminal, and a man with blood on his hands as well as his apron, and there are people, he and I among them, who wonder at our friendship. I would be hard put to explain it, but neither could I easily explain my relationship with Elaine. It may be that all friendships are ultimately inexplicable, although some of them are harder to figure than others.
MICK invited me back to Grogan's for coffee or a Coke but I begged off. He admitted he was tired himself. 'But one night next week we'll make a night of it,' he said. 'And at closing time we'll lock the doors and sit in the dark telling old stories.'
'That sounds good to me.'
'And go to mass in the morning.'
'I don't know about that part of it,' I said. 'But the rest sounds good.'
He dropped me in front of the Northwestern and I stopped at the desk on my way upstairs. There weren't any messages. I went on up and went to bed.
Waiting for sleep to come I found myself remembering the man I'd seen in Maspeth, the father who'd sat with his son in the front row of the center section. I knew I'd seen him somewhere and I still couldn't think where. The boy wasn't familiar to me, just the father.
Lying there in the dark it struck me that what was remarkable was not that the man looked familiar. I see people every day whom I sense I've seen before, and no wonder; New York teems with people, and thousands upon thousands of them pass through my field of vision every day, on the street, down in the subway, at a ballpark or in a theater or, say, a sports arena in Queens. No, what was unusual was not the sense of recognition but the urgency of the whole thing. For some reason I evidently felt it was very important that I place this man, that I figure out who he was and how I knew him.
Sitting there, his arm around the boy, his hand gripping the kid's shoulder, his other hand pointing at this and at that as he explained the ring action. And then another image, the hand moving to the boy's forehead, moving to smooth the light brown hair.
I focused on the image, wondering what could invest it with such urgency, and my mind fastened on it and then wandered down some other corridor, and I slept.
I awoke a few hours later when a garbage-collection crew made a noisy job of picking up at the restaurant next door. I used the bathroom and came back to bed. Images flickered in my mind's eye. The placard girl, tossing her head, straightening her shoulders. The father, his face animated. The hand on the boy's forehead. The girl. The father. The girl. The hand moving, smoothing the hair-
Christ!
I sat up. My heart was pounding, my mouth dry. I had trouble catching my breath.
I reached over, switched on the bedside lamp. I looked at the clock. It was a quarter to four, but I was done sleeping for the night.
Chapter 5
Six months earlier, on an oppressively hot Tuesday night around the middle of July, I was at my regular evening meeting in the basement of St. Paul 's. I know it was a Tuesday because I had undertaken a six-month commitment to help stack the chairs after the Tuesday meetings. The theory holds that service of that sort helps you keep sober. I don't know about that. My own feeling is that not drinking keeps you sober, but stacking chairs probably doesn't do any harm. It's hard to pick up a drink while you've got a chair in each hand.
I don't remember anything specific about the meeting itself, but during the break a fellow named Will came up to me and said he'd like to talk with me after the meeting. I said that would be fine, but I wouldn't be able to leave
