He filled his glass and took a drink. "I didn't want to kill him," he said, "because I'd have had to kill the wife too, and the old woman. I'd leave the baby because a baby can't pick you out of a lineup, but what kind of a life would I be leaving it? It's got a bad enough life already, with that for a father.
"Because look how he called my bluff. 'I don't think you do thees.' The bastard didn't care if I did it. Go ahead, kill the baby, he can always start another one. But when it was a question of his hand winding up on the floor, why, he wasn't so fucking tough then, was he?"
A little later he said, "Sometimes you have to kill them. One runs for the door and you drop him, and then you have to take out all the rest of them. Or you know they're not people who will let it go, and it's kill them or watch your back for the rest of your life. What you do then is scatter the drugs all over the place. Grind the bricks to powder, pour it on the bodies, tread it into the rug. Let it look like dealers killing each other. The cops don't break their necks to solve that kind of killing."
"Don't you ever take the drugs along?"
"I don't," he said, "and I'm giving up a fortune, and I just don't care. There's so much money in it. You wouldn't have to deal in it, you could sell the lot to someone. It wouldn't be hard to find someone who wanted to buy it."
"No, I don't suppose it would."
"But I'll have no part of it, and I won't work with anyone who'll use it or traffic in it. The cocaine I left behind the other night, I could have got more for it than I took in cash from the dryer vent. There was only eighty thousand there." He lifted his glass, set it down again. "There should have been more. I know he had another stash somewhere in the fucking house, but I'd have had to chop off his hand to get it. And that would have meant killing him after, and killing the lot of them. And calling the police later, telling them there was a baby crying in a house on such-and-such a street."
"Better to take the eighty thousand."
"That's what I thought," he said. "But there's four thousand right off the top for the lad who told us where to go and how to get in. A finder's fee, you call it. Five percent, and I shouldn't wonder he thought we got more and were cheating him. Four thousand for him, and a good night's pay for Tom and Andy and the fourth fellow, whom you don't know. And what's left for myself is a little less than what I paid to get Andy off the hook for the hijacking." He shook his head. "I always need money," he said. "I don't understand it."
I talked some about Richard Thurman and his dead wife, and about the man we'd seen at the fights in Maspeth. I took out the sketch and he looked at it. "It's very like him," he said. "And the man who drew it never saw the man he was drawing? You wouldn't think it could be done."
I put the sketch away and he said, "Do you believe in hell?"
"I don't think so."
"Ah, you're fortunate. I believe in it. I believe there's a place reserved for me there, a chair by the fire."
"Do you really believe that, Mick?"
"I don't know about the fire, or little devils with fucking pitchforks. I believe there's something for you after you die, and if you lead a bad life you've got a bad lot ahead of you. And I don't lead the life of a saint."
"No."
"I kill people. I only do it out of need, but I lead a life that makes killing a requirement." He looked hard at me. "And I don't mind the killing," he said. "There are times I have a taste for it. Can you understand that?"
"Yes."
"But to kill a wife for the insurance money, or to kill a child for pleasure." He frowned. "Or taking a woman against her will. There's more men than you'd think who'll do that last. You'd think it was just the twisted ones but sometimes I think it's half the human race. Half the male sex, anyway."
"I know," I said. "When I was at the Academy they taught us that rape was a crime of anger toward women, that it wasn't sexual at all. But over the years I stopped believing that. Half the time nowadays it seems to be a crime of opportunity, a way to have sex without taking her to dinner first. You're committing a robbery or a burglary, there's a woman there, she looks good to you, so why not?"
He nodded. "Another time," he said. "Like last night, but over the river in Jersey. Dope dealers in a fine house out in the country, and we were going to have to kill everybody in the house. We knew that before we went in." He drank whiskey and sighed. "I'll go to hell for sure. Oh, they were killers themselves, but that's no excuse, is it?"
"Maybe it is," I said. "I don't know."
"It's not." He put the glass down and wrapped his hand around the bottle but didn't lift it from the table. "I'd just shot the man," he said, "and one of the lads was searching for more cash, and I heard cries coming from another room. So I went in there, and there's one of the boys on top of the woman, with her skirt up and her clothes ripped, and she's fighting him and crying out."
" 'Get off her,' I told him, and he looked at me like I was mad. She was choice, he said, and we were going to kill her anyway, so why shouldn't he have her before she was no use to anybody?"
"What did you do?"
"I kicked him," he said. "I kicked him hard enough to break three ribs, and then before I did anything else I shot her between the eyes, because she shouldn't have to put up with more of it. And then I picked him up and threw him against the wall, and when he came stumbling off it I hit him in the face. I wanted to kill him, but there were people who knew he'd worked for me and it would be like leaving a calling card behind. I took him away from there and paid him his share and got a closemouthed doctor to bandage his ribs, and then I packed him off. He was from Philadelphia, and I told him to go back there, that he was finished in New York. I'm sure he doesn't know to this day what he did that was wrong. She was going to die anyway, so why not have the use of her first? And why not roast her liver and eat it, why let the flesh go to waste?"
"There's a pretty thought."
"In the name of Jesus," he said, "we're all going to die, aren't we? So why not do any bloody thing we please with each other? Is that it? Is that how the world works?"
"I don't know how the world works."
"No, and neither do I. And I don't know how you get through it on fucking coffee, I swear I don't. If I didn't have this-"
He filled his glass.
LATER we were talking about black men. He had little use for them and I let him tell me why. "Now there's some who are all right," he said. "I'll grant you that. What was the name of that fellow we met at the fights?"
"Chance."
"I liked him," he said, "but you'd have to say he's another type entirely from the usual run. He's educated, he's a gentleman, he's a professional man."
"Do you know how I got to know him?"
"At his place of business, I would suppose. Or didn't you say you met him at the fights?"
"That's where we met, but there was a business reason for the meeting. That was before Chance was an art dealer. He was a pimp then. One of his whores got killed by a lunatic with a machete, and he hired me to look into it."
"He's a pimp, then."
"Not anymore. Now he's an art dealer."
"And a friend of yours."
"And a friend of mine."
"You have an odd taste in friends. What's so funny?"
" 'An odd taste in friends.' A cop I know said that to me."