Butch’s hang was the velvet dog, across the street from the twenty-ninth precinct. Best to approach him there, where he’d be comfortable. A couple of drinks down and I’d be more comfortable too.
The place was full of noise when I arrived. Full of noise and beer and friendship. There were groups of two and three and four dispersed throughout the joint, each group enclosed in its own small world of warmth, shared experience and feeling.
I found a seat in the back. I ordered a Guinness. A meal in itself. Thick, meaty and nutritious. Carbs enough for a week.
I nursed it.
I thought about stuff.
The kind of sweaty camaraderie that now was all around me made me more than faintly uncomfortable. I’d missed the locker room thing. I’d spent my adolescence avoiding it. Cultivating contempt for sweaty guys who’d never heard of Dostoevsky. I was always smaller than the rest, and slower. Lacking killer instinct. Late to sport the hair and manliness you needed to compete for shower space and recognition.
I was on my second Guinness when I spied Butch, coming in the door, nodding and smiling, shaking hands and slapping shoulders. In his element.
I let him settle in. When he seemed as comfortable as a man can be, I contrived to sidle up to him.
Hey Butch, I said, good to see you.
Rick, my man, he said. How goes the battle?
It goes. It doesn’t go. Shit happens. Then it doesn’t.
I think I get the drift, he laughed. Sounds like my life, too.
I smiled. I put a hand on his shoulder.
Come on back, I said.
I nodded to my booth.
Sure, he said. Give me a minute. I got to talk to some guys.
I retreated to the back. Butch made the rounds. Some backslapping here, a little joking there.
He was a big guy. Broad-shouldered and black as Kenyan coffee, with a smooth shaved head that somehow made him look even bigger. But he also had that huge warm smile, and a soft side that he knew how to use to his advantage.
Ten minutes later, he made his way to the booth. He sat down.
So what can I do for you, my friend?
Butch did not stand on ceremony. It was one of the things I liked about him. No need to indulge in the tribal chitchat. Get to the point.
Hey, I said, I know you’ve got your rules. But I was hoping you could tell me what you can.
He gave me a knowing smile.
Hey, Rick, he said, you’re not tight with Internal Affairs, are you?
Not on this one, I laughed. Next time maybe.
Okay, just wanted to make sure. Anyway, I don’t mind telling you what I know, because what I know isn’t much. I hear it’s pretty cut and dried, Rick.
That may be so, I said. But I’ve got my job to do. The kid says he didn’t do it.
Well, there’s a shock.
I know, I know, I smiled. But I got to tell you, there’s something very believable about him. He’s an angry kid. But I don’t see any guile in him.
You don’t need guile to hit a guy upside the head with a blunt instrument.
All right. I know. I’m not going to convince you of anything.
You always were a wimp.
Just tell me what you can.
He gave it some thought. He ran his hands over his cleanly shaven head.
Okay, here’s what I know. The guys have a fight. Sounded pretty damn vicious. A lot of thumping and banging and yelling. Then it all goes quiet. We got a time on that. One thirty-five a.m. Almost exactly an hour later, some homeless guy in an alley about three blocks away picks up a big cardboard box. Going to use it for a house or something. And under the box is the body of this kid. His face is half caved in. Blunt trauma. Kid’s dead as a doorknob. They haven’t found the weapon yet.
Nose broken.
Whole fucking face broken, Rick.
Any witnesses?
Not that I know about. Old lady in the building on the other side of the alley thinks she heard something. But she’s vague about it. So far, nobody saw nothing.
So how’d they find Jules?
Somebody in his building called in a complaint about the noise. When they were fighting. Nobody’d got around to showing up by the time the body was found. But after that, somebody made the connection.
So it’s all circumstantial. Not enough to arrest him on.
They usually are, my friend, Butch laughed. But yeah. Sort of. Brought him in, but couldn’t hold him. Took them hours to get a warrant to search the kid’s place. Got the wrong judge.
Albertson?
You got it. What’s the probable cause, he says. Shit.
Well, there are two sides to that argument.
I guess, he smiled. They’re doing tests now. The usual forensic stuff. Talk to me in a couple of days. The picture might be different.
Could have been random. A mugging.
Sure. Always possible. But it didn’t look like it. Too vicious. Looked like something personal.
I asked whether they had tracked down Larry Silver’s relatives, friends. Looked for folks with grudges.
Sure, he said. The family’s in Kansas somewhere. Hadn’t heard from him in two years. Nice old folks. Had Larry late in life. Couldn’t understand what went wrong. His brother is twenty years older. Has a good job down at the feedlot. Comes to dinner every Sunday. Something just clicked in Larry one day, when he was fifteen or so. Gone wild, they said. Like a barnyard dog. Nothing you could do but stay away from him. And then he left town. Didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t leave a note. Never wrote. Never called. They’d just sort of written him off. Hoped one day he’d come to his senses. Give them a call. Send a postcard.
Friends?
The usual losers you get with a guy like that. Small-time dealers. Runaways like him. He’d lived in Riverside Park for a while. Stretched some plastic between two trees. Begged for quarters. Til some local punks rousted him out of there. Got lucky. Ran into somebody who got him a job. Flipping burgers somewhere. Didn’t last long. Just long enough for him to get a little place in Williamsburg, pay a couple months’ rent. Nobody really liked him much. He was a moody guy. Chip on his shoulder. But nobody really hated him either. They just tolerated him.
Not much to go on.
Not much.
I don’t have the resources to reinvent the wheel, I said. Do me a favor, if you can, Butch. Just get the details on a couple of kids most likely to have information about him. Who knew him best. Who might know something. I might find something your guys missed.
Always possible, Rick. I’ll see what I can do.
From most people, that would be a no. From Butch, it was a yes.
All right, I said. Hey, I really appreciate this, Butch.
Rick, I owe you. You know that.
Actually, I didn’t know that. But I was happy to let him think so.