I thought I heard the phone while I was in the shower. It was ringing when I got out. I wrapped a towel around my middle and went to answer it.

“Scudder? Mick Ballou. Did I wake you, man?”

“I was already up.”

“Good man. It’s early, but I have to see you. Say ten minutes? In front of your hotel?”

“Better make it twenty.”

“Sooner if you can,” he said. “We don’t want to be late.”

Late for what? I shaved quickly, put on a suit. I’d spent a restless night, dream-ridden, my dreams full of doorway stakeouts and drive-by shootings. Now it was seven-thirty in the morning and I had a date with the Butcher. Why? For what?

I tied my tie, grabbed up my keys and wallet. There was nobody waiting for me in the lobby. I went outside and saw the car at the curb, parked next to a hydrant directly in front of the hotel. The big silver Cadillac. Tinted glass all around, but I could see him behind the wheel now because he had lowered the window on the passenger side and was leaning halfway across the front seat, motioning me over.

I crossed the pavement, opened the door. He was wearing a white butcher’s apron that covered him from the neck down. There were rust-colored stains on the white cotton, some of them vivid, some of them bleached and faded. I found myself wondering at the wisdom of getting into a car with a man so dressed, but there was nothing in his manner to lead me to fear that I was going to be taken for that sort of ride. His hand was out and I shook it, then got in and drew the door shut.

He pulled away from the curb, drove to the corner of Ninth and waited for the light. He asked again if he’d awakened me and I said he hadn’t. “Your man at the desk said you weren’t answering,” he said, “but I made him ring again.”

“I was in the shower.”

“But you had a night’s sleep?”

“A few hours.”

“I never got to bed,” he said. The light turned and he made a fast left in front of oncoming traffic, then had to stop for the light at Fifty-sixth. He had touched a button to raise my windshield, and I looked through tinted glass at the morning. It was an overcast day, with the threat of rain in the air, and through the dark window the sky looked ominous.

I asked where we were going.

“The butchers’ mass,” he said.

I though of some weird heretical rite, men in bloody aprons brandishing cleavers, a lamb sacrificed.

“At St. Bernard’s. You know it?”

“Fourteenth Street?”

He nodded. “They have daily mass at seven in the main sanctuary. And then there’s another mass at eight in a small room off to the left, and there’s only a handful ever to come to it. My father went every morning before work. Sometimes he’d take me with him. He was a butcher, he worked in the markets down there. This was his apron.”

The light turned and we cruised down the avenue. The lights were timed, and when one was out of sync he slowed, looked left and right, and sailed on through it. We caught a light we couldn’t run at one of the approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel, then made them all clear to Fourteenth Street, where he hung a left turn. St. Bernard’s was a third of the way down the block on the downtown side of the street. He pulled up just short of it and parked in front of a storefront funeral parlor. Signs at the curb prohibited parking during business hours.

We got out of the car and Ballou waved at someone inside the funeral parlor. Twomey & Sons, the sign said, and I suppose it was Twomey or one of his sons who waved back. I kept pace with Ballou, up the steps and through the main doors of the church.

He led me down a side aisle and into a small room on the left, where perhaps a dozen worshipers occupied three rows of folding chairs. He took a seat in the last row and motioned for me to sit next to him.

Another half-dozen people found their way into the room during the next few minutes. There were several elderly nuns in the group, a couple of older women, two men in business suits and one in olive work clothes, and four men beside Ballou in butchers’ aprons.

At eight the priest entered. He looked Filipino, and his English was lightly accented. Ballou opened a book for me and showed me how to follow the service. I stood when the others stood, sat when they sat, knelt when they knelt. There was a reading from Isaiah, another from Luke.

When they gave out communion, I stayed where I was. So did Ballou. Everyone else took the wafer, except for a nun and one of the butchers.

The whole thing didn’t take all that long. When it was over Ballou strode from the room and on out of the church, and I tagged along in his wake.

* * *

On the street he lit a cigarette and said, “My father went every morning before work.”

“So you said.”

“It was in Latin then. They took the mystery out when they put it in English. He went every morning. I wonder what he got out of it.”

“What do you get out of it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t go that often. Maybe ten or twenty times in a year. I’ll go three days in a row and then I’ll stay away for a month or two.” He took another drag on his cigarette and threw the butt into the street. “I don’t go to confession, I don’t take communion, I don’t pray. Do you believe in God?”

“Sometimes.”

“Sometimes. Good enough.” He took my arm. “Come on,” he said. “The car’s all right where it is. Twomey won’t let them tow it or ticket it. He knows me, and he knows the car.”

“I know it, too.”

“How’s that?”

“I saw it last night. I copied the plate number, I was going to run it through Motor Vehicles today. Now I won’t have to.”

“You wouldn’t have learned much,” he said. “I’m not the owner. There’s another name on the registration.”

“There’s another name on the license at Grogan’s.”

“There is. Where did you see the car?”

“On Fiftieth Street a little after one. Neil Tillman got into it and you drove away.”

“Where were you?”

“Across the street.”

“Keeping an eye out?”

“That’s right.”

We were walking west on Fourteenth. We crossed Hudson and Greenwich and I asked where we were going. “I was up all night,” he said. “I need a drink. After a butchers’ mass where would you go but a butchers’ bar?” He looked over at me, and something glinted in his green eyes. “You’ll likely be the only man there in a suit. Salesmen come in there, but not this early. But you’ll be all right. Meatcutters are a broadminded lot. Nobody’ll hold it against you.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

We were in the meat district now. Markets and packing houses lined both sides of the street and men in aprons like Ballou’s unloaded carcasses from big trucks and hooked them up onto the overhead racks. The raw stink of the dead meat hung in the air like smoke, overriding the burnt reek of the trucks’ exhaust. Beyond, at the end of the street, you could see dark clouds lowering over the Hudson, and high-rise apartments on the Jersey side. But for these last, the whole scene looked as though it had sprung from an earlier time. The trucks should have been horse-drawn; then you’d have sworn you were in the nineteenth century.

The bar he took me to was on Washington Street at the corner of Thirteenth. The sign said bar, and if it had more of a name than that they were keeping it a secret. It was a small room, its board floor liberally strewn with sawdust. There was a sandwich menu posted, and a pot of coffee made. I was glad to see that. It was a little early in the day for Coca-Cola.

The bartender was a beefy fellow with a flattop haircut and a brushy moustache. There were three men standing at the bar, two of them in butcher’s aprons, both of the aprons richly bloodstained. There were half a dozen square tables of dark wood, all of them empty. Ballou got a glass of whiskey and a cup of black coffee from the bar and led me to the table that was farthest from the door. I sat down. He started to sit, then looked at his glass and saw that it didn’t hold enough. He went back to the bar and returned with the bottle. It was Jameson, but not the premium stuff he drank at his own place.

He wrapped his big hand around his glass and raised it a few inches from the tabletop in a wordless toast. I raised my coffee mug in acknowledgment. He drank half the whiskey. It might have been water for all the effect it had on him.

He said, “We have to talk.”

“All right.”

“You knew the minute I looked at the girl. Didn’t you?”

“I knew something.”

“Took me on the blind side, it did. You came in talking about poor Eddie Dunphy. And then we talked about every damned thing, didn’t we?”

“Just about.”

“I thought what a devious bastard you were, leading me round the barn and then dropping her picture on the table. But that wasn’t it at all, was it?”

“No. I didn’t have anything to connect her to you or to Neil. I was just trying to find out what was on Eddie’s mind.”

“And I had no reason to have my guard up. I didn’t know a fucking thing about Eddie or his mind or what he might have had on it.” He drank the rest of the whiskey and put the glass on the table. “Matt, I have to do this. Come into the men’s room so I can be certain you’re not wearing a wire.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk around the point. I want to say whatever comes to mind and I can’t do that unless I know you’re clean.”

The lavatory was small and dank and foul. It wouldn’t hold us both comfortably, so he stood outside and held the door open. I took off my jacket and shirt and tie and lowered my trousers while he apologized for the indignity of it all. Then he held my jacket while I got dressed. I took my time getting my tie knotted right, then took my jacket from him and put it on. We went back to the table and sat down, and he poured more whiskey into his glass.

“The girl’s dead,” he said.

Something settled lower within me. I had known she was dead, had sensed it and reasoned it both, but evidently there had been a part of me that had gone on hoping.

I said, “When?”

“Sometime in July. I don’t know the date.” He gripped his glass but didn’t lift it. “Before Neil came to work for me he was behind the bar at a tourist place.”

“The Druid’s Castle.”

“You’d know that, of course. He had a racket there.”

“Credit cards.”

He nodded. “He came to me with it, I put him in touch with someone. There’s a lot of money in it, those little plastic cards, though it’s not the kind of business I care for, not for myself. You can’t get your hands into it, it’s moving numbers around. But it was a good thing for all concerned, and then they caught on at the restaurant and they let him go.”

“That’s where he met Paula.”

He nodded. “She was in it with him. She would run an impression of the cards on her own machine before she took the cards to the cashier. Or they’d give her their carbons to tear up, only she wouldn’t do it, she’d pass them on to Neil. After he left she stayed on there, and he had her bringing slips and carbons to him, he had girls at a couple of places doing that. But then she quit, she didn’t care to wait on tables anymore.”

He picked up the glass and took a drink. “She moved in with him. She kept her room so that her parents wouldn’t know what she was doing. Sometimes she came to the bar when he was working, but more often she’d wait and come by for him when his shift was over. He didn’t just tend bar.”

“He still had his credit card scam?”

“That didn’t last. But hanging around, you know, he found things to do. You could tell him the make and model and he’d steal you a car. He went along a couple of times when some boys took off a truck. There’s good money in that.”

“I’m sure there is.”

“The details don’t matter. He was all right, you know, for what he was. But it bothered me, having her around.”

“Why?”

“Because she didn’t fit. She was along for the ride but she didn’t belong. What does her father do?”

“He sells Japanese cars.”

“And not stolen ones, either.”

“I wouldn’t think so, no.”

He uncapped the bottle, raised it. He asked me if I wanted more coffee.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“I should be drinking coffee myself. When I’m up this long, though, the whiskey is like coffee to me, it fuels it and keeps it all rolling.” He filled his glass. “She was a nice Protestant girl from Indiana,” he said. “She’d steal, but she stole for the thrill of it. You can’t trust that, it’s almost as bad as a man who kills for the thrill of it. A good thief doesn’t steal for the thrill. He steals for the money. And the best thief of all steals because he’s a thief.”

“What happened to Paula?”

“She heard something she shouldn’t have heard.”

“What?”

“You don’t have to know. Ah, what’s the difference? There were these dago bastards brought in a load of heroin and sold it, and someone shot the whole fucking lot of them and took their money. There was something in the papers. They got it all wrong, but maybe you remember it.”

“I remember it.”

“He had her out at the farm. There’s a farm up in Ulster County, it has another man’s name on the deed, but it’s mine the way the car and Grogan’s are mine.” He took a drink. He said, “I don’t own a fucking thing, can you believe that? One fellow lets me drive his car, another lets me live in an apartment even if his name’s on the lease. And there’s this couple, his people are from County Westmeath, he’s always liked the country. He and his wife live there and the deed says they own it, and he milks the cows and slops the hogs and she feeds the chickens and collects the eggs, and I can go and stay up there anytime I want. And if some bastard from Internal Revenue ever wants to know where my money came from, why, what money? What do I own I ever had to buy?”

“Neil had Paula at the farm,” I prompted.

“And everyone was relaxed, and talking freely, and she heard too damn much. And she wouldn’t stand up, you know. If anyone was to ask her a question, she’d be the white-bread Protestant girl from Indiana, you know, and she’d tell them everything. So I told Neil he had to get rid of her.”

“You ordered him to kill her?”

“The hell I did!” He slammed the glass on the table, and at first I thought his anger was for me, that the question itself enraged him. “I never told him to kill her,” he said. “I said he should send her to hell and gone out of New York. She’d be no danger if she wasn’t around. She wouldn’t have anybody asking her questions back in Indiana, not the cops nor the fucking guineas either. But if she was around, you know, there was always the chance she could turn out to be a problem.”

“But he mistook your orders?”

“He did not. Because he came back and told me it was all taken care of. She’d got on a plane to Indianapolis and we’d never be seeing her again. She was all checked out of her room, all on her way back home, and she was no loose end for anybody to be nervous about.” He picked up his glass again, put it down, pushed it a few inches away from him. “The other night,” he said, “when I turned over the card you gave me and saw her picture staring back at me, it gave me a turn. Because why would anyone come around looking for a girl who was back home with her mother and father?”

“What happened?”

“That’s what I asked him. “What happened, Neil? If you’ve sent the girl home, why have her parents hired a man to search for her?’ She went home to Indiana, he said, but she didn’t stay. She got right on a plane to Los Angeles to make her fortune in Hollywood. And never so much as called her parents? Well, he said, perhaps something happened to her out there. Perhaps she took to drugs, or fell in with a bad lot. After all, she’d got into the fast life here, so she might have gone looking for it out there. I knew he was lying.”

“Yes.”

“But I let it go for then.”

“He called me,” I said. “It must have been Saturday morning, early. Probably just a few hours after he closed up at Grogan’s.”

“I talked with him that night. We locked the door and turned down the lights and drank whiskey and he told me how she’d gone to Hollywood to be a movie star. And then he called you? What did he say?”

“That I should stop looking for her. That I was wasting my time.”

“Stupid lad. Stupid call to make. Just let you know you were getting on to something, wouldn’t it?”

“I already knew.”

He nodded. “Gave it all away myself, didn’t I? But I never knew I had anything to give away. Thought for all the world she was home in Indiana. What’s the name of the town?”

“Muncie.”

“Muncie, that’s it.” He looked at his whiskey, then drank some of it. I never drank Irish much but I got a sudden sense-memory of it now, not as smoky as scotch or as oily as bourbon. I drank the rest of my coffee, gulping it as if it were an antidote.

He said, “I knew he was lying. I gave him a little time to let his nerves get the better of him, and then last night I took him for a long ride upstate and got it all out of him. We went up to Ellenville. That’s where the farm is. That’s where he took her.”

“When?”

“Whenever it was. July. He took her there for a last weekend, he said, a treat before she went back home where she came from. And he gave her a little cocaine, he said, and her heart failed. She didn’t take that much, he said, but you can’t predict with cocaine, it will get the better of you now and then.”

“And that’s how she died?”

“No. Because the bastard was lying. I got the story out of him. He took her up to the farm and told her how she had to go home. And she refused, and she got drunk and angry and started threatening to go to the police. And she was making a lot of noise, and he was afraid she’d rouse the couple who take care of the place. And, trying to quiet her, he hit her too hard and she died.”

“But that wasn’t it either,” I said. “Was it?”

“No. Because why would he drive her a hundred miles to tell her she had to get on an airplane? Christ, what a liar he was!” He flashed a shark’s grin. “But, you know, I didn’t have to read him his rights. He didn’t have the right to remain silent. He didn’t have the right to an attorney.” Unconsciously his hand moved to touch one of the darker stains on the front of his apron. “He talked.”

“And?”

“He took her up there to kill her, of course. He claimed she never would have agreed to go home, that he’d sounded her out on it, that all she did was swear she could be counted on to keep her mouth shut. He took her up to the farm and gave her a lot to drink and then took her outside and made love to her in the grass. Had all her clothes off, laid with her in the moonlight. And then while she was lying there afterward he took out a knife and let her see it. ‘What’s that?’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’ And he stabbed her.”

My coffee cup was empty. I left Ballou at the table and took my cup to the bar and let the barman fill it up again. Crossing the floor, I fancied the sawdust underfoot was blood-soaked. I thought I could see it and smell it. But it was just spilled beer that I was seeing, and the smell was the meat smell from the street outside.

When I got back Ballou was looking at the picture I’d given him. “She was a pretty girl,” he said evenly. “Prettier than you’d know from her picture. Lively, she was.”

“Until he killed her.”

“Until then.”

“He left her there? I’ll want to get the body, arrange to ship it back to them.”

“You can’t.”

“There’d be a way to do it without opening an investigation. I think her parents would cooperate if I explained it to them. Especially if I could tell them that justice had been done.” The phrase sounded stilted, but it said what I wanted to say. I glanced at him. “It has been done, hasn’t it?”

He said, “Justice? Is justice ever done?” He frowned, following the thought through the fumes of his whiskey. “The answer to your question,” he said, “is yes.”

“I thought so. But the body—”

“You can’t take it, man.”

“Why not? Wouldn’t he say where he buried it?”

“He never buried her.” His hand, resting on the table between us, tightened into a fist. His fingers went white at the knuckles.

I waited.

He said. “I told you about the farm. All it’s supposed to be is a place in the country, but the two of them, O’Mara’s their name, they like to farm it. She has a garden, and all summer long they’re giving me corn and tomatoes. And zucchini, they’re always after me to take zucchini.” He opened his fist, spread his hand palm-down on the tabletop. “He has a dairy herd, two dozen head. Holsteins, they are. He sells the milk and keeps what it brings him. They try to give me milk, but what do I want with it? The eggs, though, are the best you’ll ever have. They’re free range chickens. Do you know what that means? It means they have to scratch for a living. Christ, I’d say it does them good. The yolks are deep yellow, close to orange. Someday I’ll bring you some of those eggs.”

I didn’t say anything.

“He keeps hogs there, too.”

I took a sip of my coffee. For a moment I tasted bourbon in it, and I thought he might have added it to my cup while I was away from the table. But of course that was nonsense, I’d had the cup with me, and the bottle on the table held Irish whiskey, not bourbon. But I used to take my coffee that way, and my memory was pitching me curves and sliders, showing me blood on the sawdust underfoot, putting a bourbon taste in my coffee.

He said, “Every year there are farmers who pass out drunk in the hog pen, or fall and knock themselves out, and do you know what happens to them?”

“Tell me.”

“The hogs eat them. Hogs will do that. There’s men in the country who advertise that they’ll pick up dead cows and horses, dispose of them for you. A hog needs a certain amount of animal matter in his diet, you see. He craves it, thrives better if he has it.”

“And Paula—”

“Ah, Jesus,” he said.

I wanted a drink. There are a hundred reasons why a man will want a drink, but I wanted one now for the most elementary reason of all. I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling, and a voice within was telling me that I needed the drink, that I couldn’t bear it without it.

But that voice is a liar. You can always bear the pain. It’ll hurt, it’ll burn like acid in an open wound, but you can stand it. And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.

“I believe he wanted to do it,” Mickey Ballou said. “To kill her with his knife and hoist her into the pen, to stand with his arms against the rail fence and watch the swine go at her. He had no call to do it. She would have gone home where she belonged and nobody would ever have heard of her again. He might have thrown a scare into her if he had to, but he never had any call to kill her. So I have to think he did it to take delight in it.”

“He’s not the first.”

“No,” he said fervently, “and sometimes there’s joy to be found in it. Have you known that joy?”

“No.”

“I have,” he said. He turned the bottle so that he could read the label. Without looking up he said, “But you don’t kill for no good reason. You don’t make up reasons to give yourself an excuse to shed blood. And you don’t fucking lie about it to them you shouldn’t lie to. He killed her on my fucking farm and fed her to my fucking hogs, and then he let me go on thinking she was baking cookies in her mother’s kitchen in fucking Muncie, Indiana.”

“You picked him up at the bar last night.”

“I did.”

“And drove up to Ulster County, I think you said. To the farm.”

“Yes.”

“And you were up all night.”

“I was. It’s a long drive there and a long drive back, and I wanted to get to mass this morning.”

“The butchers’ mass.”

“The butchers’ mass,” he agreed.

“It must have been tiring,” I said. “Driving all the way there and back, and I suppose you’d been drinking.”

“I had for a fact, and it’s true it was a tiring drive. But, you know, there’s no traffic at that hour.”

“That’s true.”

“And on the way up,” he said, “I had him along for company.”

“And on the way back?”

“I played the radio.”

“I suppose that helped.”

“It did,” he said. “It’s a wonderful radio they put in a Cadillac. Speakers front and back, the sound as clear as good whiskey. You know, hers wasn’t the first body ever went in that hog pen.”

“Nor the last?”

He nodded, lips set, eyes like green flint. “Nor the last,” he said.