A Dance at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block Page A

better. Were better. I retired, and then I looked for something to do, and Mr. Chance said to see if I liked working for him. Mr. Coulter, I mean."
    It was an easy mistake for him to make. When I first met Chance that one syllable was the only name he had, and it wasn't until he went into the art business that he added an initial in front and a surname after.
    "And do you like it?"
    "It beats getting hit in the face. And yes, I like it very much. I'm learning things. There's never a day I don't learn something."
    "I wish I could say the same," Chance said. "Matthew, it's about time you came to see me. I thought you were going to join us last night, you and your friend. We all trooped downstairs to Eldon's dressing room and when I turned around to introduce you you weren't there."
    "We decided not to make a long night of it."
    "And it did turn out to be a long night. Do you still have a taste for good coffee?"
    "Do you still get that special blend?"
    " Jamaican Blue Mountain. The price is outrageous, of course, but look around you." He indicated the masks and statues. "The price of everything is ridiculous. Black, right? Arthur, could you bring us some coffee? And then you'll want to get at those invoices."
    He had first served me Jamaican coffee at his home, a converted firehouse on a quiet street in Greenpoint. His Polish neighbors thought the house belonged to a housebound retired physician named Levandowski, and that Chance was the good doctor's houseman and chauffeur. Instead Chance lived there alone in a house with a full weight gym and an eight-foot pool table and walls lined with museum-quality African art.
    I asked if he still had the firehouse.
    "Oh, I couldn't bear to move," he said. "I thought I'd have to sell in order to open this place, but I found a way. After all, I didn't have to purchase stock. I had a house jammed full of it."
    "Do you still have a collection?"
    "Better than ever. In a sense it's all my collection, and in another sense everything I have is for sale, so it's all store stock. Do you remember that Benin bronze? The queen's head?"
    "With all the necklaces."
    "I overpaid for her at auction, and every three months when she didn't sell I raised the price. It finally got so high somebody couldn't resist her. I hated to see her go, but then I took the money and bought something else." He took my arm. "Let me show you some things. I was in Africa for a month this spring, I spent two full weeks in Mali, in the Dogon country. A sweetly primitive people, their huts reminded me of the Anasazi dwellings at Mesa Verde. See, that piece is Dogon. Square holes for eyes, everything very straightforward and unapologetic."
    "You've come a long way," I said.
    "Oh, my," he said. "Haven't I just?"
    When I first met Chance he was successful, but in another line of work. He had been a pimp, though hardly the traditional figure with the pink Cadillac and the floppy purple hat. He'd hired me to find out who killed one of his girls.
    "I owe it all to you," he said. "You put me out of business."
    That was true in a sense. By the time I'd done what he hired me to do, another of his girls was dead and the rest were off his string. "You were ready for a career change anyway," I told him. "You were having a mid-life crisis."
    "Oh, I was too young for that. I'm still too young for that. Matthew? You didn't just drop in to be sociable."
    "No."
    "Or for the coffee."
    "Or that either. There was somebody I saw at the fights last night. I thought maybe you might be able to tell me who he is."
    "Somebody with me? Somebody in Rasheed's corner?"
    I shook my head. "Somebody sitting first row ringside in the center section." I sketched a diagram in midair. "Here's the ring, here's where you were sitting right by the blue corner. Here's where Ballou and I were. The guy I'm interested in was sitting right about here."
    "What did he look like?"
    "White man, balding, say five-eleven, say a hundred and ninety pounds."
    "Cruiserweight. How was