The Butcher's Son Page 11

  “Not really, but I do come from a messed-up family. And it’s even more messed up than I always thought.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Ian braced himself with another swallow of wine. It was as thick and dark as blood, and damn did it taste just right; the perfect pairing for a perfect meal.

  He inhaled deeply, swelling his lungs to the point of pain, before releasing what he had to say in one gush. “Today, I watched a video of my father being gunned down in the street, and learned that my grandfather was murdered. I never knew either man, not really, but I feel the weight of their deaths like a stone against my chest.” He paused, his gaze locking onto the beautiful woman before him. She was listening patiently, without judgment or comment, waiting for him to continue. “And there is a foot on that stone, pressing down, demanding that I provide answers to a question that I don’t comprehend.”

  They were both quiet for a minute, each lifting a glass of wine to their lips, but neither really tasting, until Rossella asked, “Whose foot is on the stone?”

  “His name is Zelig.”

  “Walter Zelig?”

  Ian studied Rossella’s face. “If Walter goes by the street name Ice Pick, then yeah. You know him?”

  “I’ve met him,” said Rossella, the words tiptoeing out of her mouth as though carefully chosen. “My grandfather knew everyone who’s anyone in this town, but especially the criminals.”

  Ian reached across the table to take Rossella’s hand. “Would your grandfather be willing to meet with me? I need to know what I’m dealing with, and how I put an end to it.”

  “I’ll set it up.”

  Rossella’s engaging smile had dimmed, so Ian asked, “Are you sure?”

  Her smile returned and she squeezed his hand. “Leave it with me.” She finished her glass of wine and signaled for the waiter. “I think we need another bottle after that, don’t you?”

  She ordered before Ian could reply.

  *

  “Would you like to see my inheritance?” Ian asked with a slurred thickness of tongue as they neared the bottom of their second bottle of Nero D’Avola.

  Rossella laughed delightedly. “Now that’s a line I haven’t heard since my debutante ball.”

  Ian smirked. “Seriously? You were a debutante?”

  Rossella flicked her hair out of her eyes and fixed Ian with a steely glare. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “No.” Ian raised his hands in defense. “I just don’t see you as the type to—”

  “Type to what?”

  Ian struggled to find the right words, and instead blurted, “To be so fucking demure.”

  Rossella tried to look shocked, but burst out laughing instead, which prompted irritated glances from other diners.

  “Well,” she said, the vowels losing their edge on her lubricated tongue, “you’re correct. The eligible young bachelors were all rather horrified when I said I’d rather steal their money while they slept than lick their hairless little balls for housekeeping allowance.”

  Ian chuckled and drained the last of the bottle into their glasses. “And what did your grandfather say to that?”

  “He said I’d make a damn fine lawyer.”

  This time, as their joint laughter filled the room to bursting, the young waiter rushed over to ask if they were quite ready for the bill and if he could call them a taxi.

  “You bet,” said Rossella with a wink. “This scoundrel still has a thing or two of interest to show me.”

  17

  The taxi dropped them in front of the butcher’s shop. The rain had stopped, leaving the street slick and fresh, but it would take more than a sprinkle of water to turn it new again.

  Rossella stared up at the rusted tin pig hanging precariously above the doorway and saluted. “I know how you feel,” she whispered to the pig.

  “Come in,” said Ian as he unlocked the door. “It might not be any warmer, but it’s dry at least.”

  Inside, Ian was pleasantly surprised to find the cleaning crew had made a start. Not only was the front room beginning to look more like he remembered, but they were running several industrial-sized dehumidifiers and a couple of electric heaters to remove the damp chill from the place.

  Beneath layers of dust and grime, solid hardwood floors and exposed brick walls were emerging. Ian had forgotten the subtle vibrancy of natural products. Hewn from the earth and locally sourced, the wood and brick gave off a frequency that artificial, mass-produced products never could. The wide oak planks were ingrained with rich shades of chestnut, maroon and amber, every battle scar adding to their character, while kiln-fired brick contained the rustic tones of autumn leaves.

  “Cozy,” said Rossella as she walked over to the large pane window that faced the street. It had been covered over by sheets of plywood on the outside when the shop went out of business, creating a canvas for creatively-stunted taggers to leave their crude calling cards in garish neon spray.

  From this side, however, Rossella could read the sign painted on the glass: Quinn Family Butchers. And in smaller type beneath: & Son.

  “Are you the son?” she asked.

  “My father,” said Ian. “But if he had stuck around and either of us had actually been interested in butchery, then, yeah, it could have been meant for me, too.”

  “It wasn’t your calling?”

  Ian shrugged. “My grandfather was a difficult man to like, so when he died and my father left, the shop became more of a yoke around our necks than anything we took pride in. I tried to take an interest, for my mother’s sake, and even began my apprenticeship, but it didn’t take.”

  “Pity,” she said, her tongue playing with her lips again. “There is something cathartic about getting your hands bloody cutting up slabs of meat.”

  “Is that right?” Ian said with a smirk.

  “Oh, trust me, butcher boy. Your senses are already tingling.”

  With a playful giggle, Rossella vanished through the magnetic curtain that separated the storefront from the back room. Ian quickly followed, feeling that familiar tingle deep in his bones, the childhood memory of inter-dimensional imagination, as he broke through the mesh.

  As an adult, however, gravity appeared to exert equal force on both sides of the curtain.

  The cleaners hadn’t entered this area yet. The large room appeared frozen in time, unchanged apart from the accumulation of dust since the day men laid down their knives and cleavers and walked out the door. After his mother died, Ian made sure every employee was paid what he or she was owed. Most were grateful for the gesture, while others thought him a fool, but deep in his marrow Ian had never been comfortable with the concept of debt — even if that debt was inherited.

  “Creepy,” said Rossella when Ian joined her.

  Her eyes were wide and glistening with curiosity as she studied the chains and pulleys, steel hooks and implements of barbarous intent.

  “My grandfather died here,” Ian said, crossing to one of the dangling hooks.

  “Make a girl feel special,” said Rossella.

  “I only saw the evidence today,” Ian added softly, lost in his own thoughts, missing the jibe. “I was told he died of an aneurism, but he was tortured to death right here.” He grabbed the hook and made its heavy chain rattle. “That’s why my father ran away. He was here, too. He saw it all.”

  “Okay, you’re starting to freak me out.”

  Ian turned, his hand still clutching the chain, his mind releasing the images he had seen at the police station, bringing him back to the present.

  “Sorry. Want to see the apartment upstairs?”

  “Is it as nice as this?”

  Ian shrugged. “Not quite.”

  Rossella laughed. “Okay, then, sure, let’s go.”

  *

  Rossella discovered the mother’s old bedroom, and when she pulled off the dusty top comforter, the blankets underneath were still reasonably clean.

  “She didn’t die on these, did she?” Rosel
la asked.

  “No. I stayed here for a week after the funeral. I remember putting fresh sheets on before I left, as though I expected her to come back, but…”

  “But?”

  Ian’s lips thinned to cover a troubling thought. “I didn’t so much leave as run away and not look back. Not unlike my father.”

  “Except,” Rossella said sternly, “all you left behind was a tired, old shop, not a wife and child.”

  Ian’s smile found its light again as he shook off all melancholy and focused on the beautiful woman in front of him. “I have to warn you, the bed squeaks. Loudly.”

  Rossella kicked off her shoes and unzipped her dress. “Prove it.”

  They made love without haste, exploring each other’s bodies with patience and care before falling asleep in a tender embrace.

  The room was pitch black when Ian woke, but he could sense that he was alone. He stumbled to the bathroom and flicked on the light to pee. When he was done, he looked around the apartment, but the bare footsteps in the dust that led to the front door told him Rossella had snuck away to the comfort and cleanliness of her own place.

  He couldn’t blame her. The apartment really was a dump.

  In the galley kitchen, Ian plucked a glass from the cupboard and filled it with cold water from the tap. While drinking, he realized that he had known exactly where the glass would be and how familiar its shape would feel in his hand. Not a thing had changed since the day he left, and yet it had been years. That was when he remembered he had been meaning to ask Rossella about who paid the taxes and fees on the building to keep the shop from falling into foreclosure.

  Returning to bed, Ian wrestled with the pillows and sheets until realizing he couldn’t find his way back into slumber. With a sigh, he pulled on his clothes and headed downstairs.

  The storefront was toasty, the electric heaters and dehumidifiers working overtime to draw decades of damp from the floors and walls. The laminated posters on the wall that showed where each cut of meat came from on which animal were little more than crumbling shreds of cardboard, good for nothing but the dump.

  The giant blackboard mounted on the brick wall behind the glass display cabinets, however, still displayed the faded remnants of the daily specials, including his grandfather’s signature sausage.

  None of the butchers’ talents had stretched to chalk art, so the board was little more than a scribbled list, with one exception: someone had taken the time to draw a squiggly oval in yellow chalk around the words Today’s Special.

  It wasn’t much, but it showed that someone had tried to make an effort even when the store was on its last legs. Ian felt a pang of guilt that he hadn’t done more to save the family legacy, although one look at the forsaken street outside reminded him that all legacies must either adapt or disappear in time.

  He crossed to the metal mesh curtain and pushed through to the back room.

  *

  The rear work space was utilitarian and bleak in comparison to its customer-friendly anterior. The warm oak flooring of the front room ended at the curtain’s edge to be replaced with a durable vinyl sealed on top of hard concrete. Multi-colored specks patterned in the vinyl were intended to mask the inevitable scars and staining that came with mixing meat, bone and sharp implements, while industrial floor drains allowed the entire area to be washed and sanitized on a daily basis.

  Today, many butcher shops installed an interior window into their workspace to allow customers to view the skill that went into creating their favorite cut of meat. It was one way of letting people know that a high standard of cleanliness wasn’t lost and that a store advertising farm-raised, free-range chicken wasn’t simply opening a box of pre-deboned breasts from a faceless, corporate slaughterhouse.

  In Augustus Quinn’s day, however, the wizard stayed behind his curtain, the quality of his product being the hallmark of his reputation. For Augustus to open a box of pre-packaged meat would be to slice his own throat.

  Ian skirted the hanging hooks and crossed to the oversize, walk-in freezer. He braced himself, thoughts of mummified meat and trapped, stomach-churning odor nagging at him since spotting its sealed doors. Holding his breath, he yanked the door handle, feeling a brief moment of resistance before the vacuum pop.

  Inside, the musty room was buzzing with the return of electricity, and a cloudy mist of bone-chilling air searched for something to preserve, but the shelves and hooks were bare.

  Ian couldn’t recall what had been done with the meat, but he was relieved to discover that someone had cleaned it out. He made a mental note to look into how he switched the refrigeration off. No point wasting electricity on something he would never need.

  Studying the empty room, the hooks, chains and pulleys giving it the appearance of a torture chamber or hard-core S&M dungeon, he had a sudden thought of transforming it into a private meeting space for Children First; a place where he could mediate with clients without disturbing anyone at a nearby desk. The thick insulation already made it soundproof.

  Exiting the room, he studied the open area with fresh eyes. There was more than enough space to move the entire Children First operation onto this floor, while still leaving him the apartment upstairs to live in.

  The idea was exciting.

  Brushing the dangling hooks aside, the iron clink and rattle of their chains a comfort in the deathly silence, Ian paced out the distance to the rear wall. The place would need to be gutted, but it definitely had potential and could save the financially hindered organization a small fortune in rent.

  Along the back wall, four large, stainless steel sinks stood to one side of a van-sized garage door for deliveries. Unlike today’s formed aluminum sheets that rattled in a breeze, this door was made of thick wood mounted on a steel frame, and likely took some muscle and grease to open.

  Looking out of place on the other side of the door was a familiar oven-sized safe with all four corners bolted to the floor. For added security, the bolts had felt the lick of a welding torch, their iron caps permanently anchored in place.

  The ancient safe reminded Ian of old black-and-white gangster flicks where the damp-browed safecracker used only skilled fingers and sensitive hearing to crack the code.

  Crouching down, Ian studied the smooth black-iron face and faded gold script of its manufacturer, wondering what use his grandfather possibly had for such security. Granted, in the era when the store first opened, working men were used to being paid in small envelopes of cash at the end of each week. This allowed them to stop into the bar for a few beers on a Friday before handing over what was left to the wife in penance for sex and a hot meal. But Augustus never had more than a few employees at any one time, certainly not enough to justify the size of the safe.

  On its front was a tarnished brass handle and a circular, combination lock.

  Ian grabbed the handle and twisted, but it refused to budge.

  He spun the combination lock, hearing it click like a playing card stuck in the spokes of a bicycle, and tried again.

  It remained inert.

  He wondered what the combination could be, what numbers mattered to his grandfather, or did safes like this come with a code already programmed in?

  The only numbers he could think of were the ones tattooed on his father’s severed ear: 1976.

  Was that why the ear was sent to me? he wondered. Someone expected the numbers to have meaning to me beyond the year of Abbie’s disappearance?

  The numbers on the dial only went up to twenty, so that left him two options. Remembering back to high school where every locker had a combination padlock, Ian spun the dial twice to clear away all previous numbers, and then entered 1, 9, 7 and 6.

  He tried the handle. Nothing.

  He spun the dial twice more before entering 19, 7 and 6.

  Nothing.

  Enjoying the puzzle, the distraction, he thought back again to his high school locker. There was always a trick to it. You spun the dial to the right for the first number, but then you h
ad to spin it to the left for the second number and back to the right for the third.

  He tried the three-number combination again, and this time was rewarded with a solid chunk as the lock disengaged. The twin hinges were old and rusted, any remnants of lubricating grease solidified and become clay, forcing him to put some muscle into it to swing the heavy door open.

  Peering inside, Ian wasn’t sure what to expect, but secretly hoped to find some small treasure that his grandfather had squirreled away. The interior of the safe contained a large cavity topped with a series of small wooden drawers. Each drawer was fronted with a delicate, hand-carved rose and a brass pull.

  The main cavity was empty. No bags of gold, microfilm or bound ledgers filled with answers for what deadly rift had occurred between the Quinn family and Walter “Ice Pick” Zelig.

  Ian opened the drawers, each one lined in blue velvet. In one drawer, he found a small brass key, its surface etched in green patina. Not knowing what it opened, he left it alone. In another drawer was a plain but solid pocket watch, made of steel rather than gold; a workingman’s watch. Its short pocket chain was snapped in half. Turning it over, the back was engraved with his grandfather’s name, A. Quinn, plus the acronym G.S.T.P and a serial number.

  Ian smiled, pleased with the find. Although it was an object he had never seen before, the watch was a link to his roots, an entanglement of blood.

  He opened another drawer and found a tarnished silver locket no larger than his thumbnail. There was no chain to accompany it. Ian cradled the locket in his palm and dug his nail into the tiny latch on its side until it popped. The locket opened on near-invisible hinges to reveal two photographs of smiling young women. On the left was his sister, Abbie, just as he remembered her, while the photo of his mother on the right was taken when she was very young, an age before Ian had come to know her face.

  The resemblance between the two was obvious, especially around the mouth and chin. Abbie’s nose, however, was his father’s, his grandfather’s, his own. She hadn’t escaped that curse.

  The last drawer was the largest and it contained another surprise. Wrapped inside an oil-stained rag was an old Army-issue Colt .45 sidearm. The gun was a brute: heavy and solid in the hand. Ian ejected the magazine, surprised to find it hadn’t seized after all this time. A glimmer of brass showed it was loaded.