'Oh, come on, Joe.'
'I swear to God. So Nickerson says to him, 'Look, Maurice, if I give you your dope back then I'll have to grab you for possession.' Just shucking him, you know? And the asshole says, 'No, man, you can't do that. Where's your probable cause?' Nick says what do you mean probable cause, my probable cause is I just handed you the fucking dope an' I seen you put it in your pocket. Maurice says no, it'd never stand up, I'd skate. And do you want to know something? I think he's probably right.'
JOE gave me the address of the Times Square store where Leveque had taken his brief fall. It was on the block between Eighth and Broadway, right on the Deuce, and since I could tell that from the number I didn't see any reason why I should go down there and look at it. I didn't know if he'd worked there for a day or a year and there was no way I was going to find out. Even if they wanted to tell me, it was unlikely that anybody knew.
I went over my notes for a few minutes, then leaned back and put my feet up. When I closed my eyes I got a quick flash of the man in Maspeth, the perfect father, smoothing his kid's hair back.
I decided I was reading too much into a gesture. I really didn't have a clue what the guy in the movie looked like under all that black rubber. Maybe the boy had looked like the youth in the film, maybe that was what had triggered my memory.
And even if it was the right guy? How was I going to find him by sniffing the fading spoor of some sad bastard who'd been dead for the better part of a year?
Thursday I'd seen them at the fights. It was Monday now. If it was his son, if the whole thing was innocent, then I was just spinning my wheels. If not, then I was too late.
If he'd planned to kill the boy, to spill his blood down the drain in the floor, it was odds-on he'd done it by now.
But why take him to the fights in the first place? Maybe he liked to work out an elaborate little psychodrama, maybe he had a protracted affair with a victim first. That would explain why the boy in the film had been so unafraid, even blase about being tied up on a torture rack.
If the boy was dead already there was nothing I could do for him. If he was alive there wasn't much I could do, either, because I was light years from identifying and locating Rubber Man and I was closing on him at a snail's pace.
All I had was a dead man. And what did I have there? Leveque died with a tape, and the tape showed Rubber Man killing a boy. Leveque had died violently, probably but not necessarily the victim of an ordinary mugging in a part of town where muggings were commonplace. Leveque had worked at a porno shop. He'd worked there off the books, so he could have worked there for years, except that Gus Giesekind had said that he stayed in most of the time, unlike a man with a regular job.
And his last regular job-
I reached for the phone book and looked up a number. When the machine answered I left a message. Then I grabbed my coat and headed over to Armstrong's.
HE was at the bar when I walked in, a slender man with a goatee and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a brown corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches and smoking a pipe with a curved stem. He would have looked perfectly at home in Paris, sipping an aperitif in a cafe on the Left Bank. Instead he was drinking Canadian ale in a Fifty-seventh Street saloon, but he didn't look out of place.
'Manny,' I said, 'I just left you a message.'
'I know,' he said. 'It was still recording when I walked in the door. You said you'd look for me here, so I walked right back out the door again. I didn't have to stop to put my coat on because I hadn't had time to take it off. And, since I live closer to this joint than you do-'
'You got here first.'
'So it would appear. Shall we get a table? It's good to see you, Matt. I don't see enough of you.'
We used to see each other almost daily when Jimmy's old Ninth Avenue place had been a second home to me. Manny Karesh had been a regular there, dropping in for an hour or so, sometimes hanging around for a whole evening. He was a technician at CBS and lived around the corner. Never a heavy drinker, he came to Jimmy's as much for the food as the beer, and more than either for the company.
We took a table and I ordered coffee and a hamburger and we brought each other up to date. He'd retired, he told me, and I said I'd heard something to that effect.
'I'm working as much as ever,' he said. 'Free-lancing, sometimes for my former employers and for anyone else who'll hire me. I have all the work I could want, and at the same time I'm collecting my pension.'
'Speaking of CBS,' I said.
'Were we?'
'Well, we are now. There's a fellow I want to ask you about because you might have known him some years ago. He worked there for three years and left in the fall of '82.'
He took his pipe from his mouth and nodded. 'Arnie Leveque,' he said. 'So he called you after all. I had wondered if he would. Why are you looking so puzzled?'
'Why would he call me?'
'You mean he didn't call you? Then why-'
'You first. Why would he have called?'
'Because he wanted a private detective. I ran into him on a shoot. It must have been, oh, six months ago.'
Longer than that, I thought.
'And I don't know how it came up, but he wanted to know if I could recommend a detective, although I couldn't swear he used the word. I said that I knew a fellow, an ex-cop who lived right here in the neighborhood, and I gave him your name and said I didn't know your number offhand, but you lived at the Northwestern. You're still there?'
'Yes.'
'And you're still doing that sort of work? I hope it was all right to give out your name.'
'Of course it was,' I said. 'I appreciate it. But he never called me.'
'Well, I haven't seen him since then, Matt, and I'm sure it's been six months, so if you haven't heard from him by now you probably won't.'
'I'm sure I won't,' I said, 'and I'm pretty sure it's been more than six months. He's been dead since last May.'
'You're not serious. He's dead? He was a young man. He carried far too much weight, of course, but even so.' He took a sip of beer. 'What happened to him?'
'He was killed.'
'Oh, for God's sake. How?'
'Stabbed by a mugger. Apparently.'
' 'Apparently.' There's a suspicion of foul play?'
'Mugging's reasonably foul play all by itself, but no, there's no official suspicion. Leveque ties into something I'm working on, or at least he may. Why did he want a private detective?'
'He didn't say.' He frowned. 'I didn't know him all that well. When he started at CBS he was young and eager. He was a technical assistant, part of a camera crew. I don't think he was with us very long.'
'Three years.'
'I would have said less than that.'
'Why did he leave?'
He tugged at his beard. 'My sense of it is that we let him go.'
'Do you remember why?'
'I doubt that I'd have known in the first place. I don't know that he blotted his copybook, as our British cousins would say, but young Arnold never had what you might call a winning personality. He was a sort of overgrown nerd, which is not a word you'll hear me use often. Still, that's what he was, and he tended to be somewhat casual about matters of personal hygiene. Went a little long between shaves, and wore the same shirt a day or two more than custom dictates. And of course he was fat. Some men are as fat but carry their weight well.
