Knife Skills

“So, the butcher comes home from his first day of work. His wife asks him, ‘How’s the new job?’ He says, ‘Offal’” The junior detective walked around the living room of the apartment, casually lifting the edges of things up with a chewed-on pencil.

“Have some respect. A person just died,” the senior detective growled from the kitchen. He snooped around the tiny room, opening cupboards, the oven door, the refrigerator. “Bingo! All right, bozo! You wanna take a look at this?”

The junior detective rushed into the cramped kitchen and found his partner with the door of the freezer open. It was an old unit, one where the fridge is on top and the freezer is a drawer at the bottom. Rising about halfway up the bin was a stack of packages wrapped in brown deli paper, the kind with a waxed side to prevent liquid from leaking out, and tied up with kitchen twine.

“So, what? Kid was a butcher. You don’t think he never nicked nothing when the boss weren’t looking?” The younger man picked up a frozen package, tested its heft and weight, then tossed it back into the freezer bin. “If anything, you got yourself a motive. Old man Mackey prolly offed the kid himself on account of all this.” He jabbed his pencil in the direction of the packages for emphasis.

“That doesn’t jibe with my thinking.”

“And why’s that?”

“You like to grill?”

“I had you over. We had two-inch thick rib-eyes, charred to perfection, sweet and pink on the inside.”

“Sure, I remember. Where’d you get the steaks?”

“Where else? Best place in town. Mackey’s Meats.”

“What color paper did old Mackey wrap your steaks in?”

The young detective opened his mouth to reply, but didn’t. He cocked his head to one side, still ruminating. “Now that you mention it, that old butcher don’t use nothing but white paper.” He jutted out his lower lip in emphasis. “Come to think, he don’t use twine, neither.”

The senior detective smiled and tapped his temple with his index finger. He reached into the freezer bin and picked up one of the packages. “You don’t think forensics would mind us taking a peek inside, do you?” Before the younger man could respond, his partner grabbed one end of a neatly tied bow of twine and pulled. After unraveling the twine on the top of the package, the old detective turned the package upside down on his palm and removed the remaining twine. Now without restraints, the paper slowly unfolded.

The younger man gasped. “It’s a heart. It’s a goddamned human heart!”

“Let’s not get hasty. I’ll have forensics open up the rest of these at the lab. It’s probably just a calf’s heart. The kid was a butcher, after all.”

“Are you saying I killed this kid?” Mr. Mackey imposed upon the two detectives. He held a thick cigar between two fat fingers; wore a bloody, leather apron over his corpulent torso; and breathed halitosis laboriously into the tiny office. The room could barely hold a desk, chair, and filing cabinet, much less the egos of a defensive proprietor and the two detectives trying to ask him questions.

“All we know is that some kid starts working for you, and a few months later, he up and dies on the premises,” the young detective asserted himself, jutting out his chin and setting his jaw.

“Look! Whatever you say, you got it wrong. I ain’t missing invoices. I ain’t missing meat. Matter a fact, since that kid started, I been making more money.” Mackey chomped down on the end of his cigar with yellow teeth. He crossed his arms and glared at the young detective.

The older detective stopped sifting through folders piled on the desk. “So what do you mean making more money? How were you making more?”

“I don’t know. This kid, he’s got, like, a gift or something. First day here, I show him how to make chops. He cuts this side up, man, almost no meat on the trim. He’s cutting this meat closer than I can, I been doing this for forty years.” Mackey waves his cigar in the air. “Aaahh!” He smashed the cigar in a ceramic ashtray on his desk. “I had to reduce the price of my stock bones.” Mackey sat in the chair behind his desk. He kicked his feet up to a corner of the desk and folded his hands upon his chest.

“So why this kid just collapse? Were you with him?” The younger detective sat on the corner of the desk across from Mackey’s feet.

“Now, Mackey,” the older detective cut in. “We’re not trying to railroad you here. Kid got out of the Navy, he’s in tip top shape. He works here for six months, it’s like his heart atrophies. He gets these weird scars and skin lesions all over his body. Then one day, he just keels over. What can you tell us about the day he died?”

“Eh? Yeah, so, I left a little early that day, like I do every Friday. I leave at four to take the deposit to the bank. The kid would stay to clean up the back. And Moira, my cashier, she’d sweep the front and lock the doors on the way out. I’m at home, pouring some whiskey, when my phone rings. ‘Mackey, you got a stiff on the floor.’” Mackey shrugged his shoulders. His belly was so large he had to put his feet on the floor to open a desk drawer. He took out a cigar box, opened the lid and selected one. Mackey made a big show of lighting it with a strike anywhere match ignited off his stiff leather apron. He puffed deeply, filling the cramped space with acrid smoke. “What do I know?”

“This girl, Moira? Is she here today?”

“Nah. She’s still a little freaked out.”

“Do you have her contact information?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“So…you think this girl knows something?” The younger detective hacked at his pie with his fork, breaking it into a dozen small globs of lard crust and cloying canned cherries, then using the fork to carefully put each piece in his mouth. He chewed slowly and deliberately, waiting until each bit had been savored before putting another in his mouth.

The older detective set his coffee down on the diner table. “She knows something. What it means, I couldn’t say. We’ll find out soon enough.” The cop took a thoughtful slurp of coffee. “I don’t get it, though. Something was happening to that kid. Whether it killed him or not, I don’t know. Did you see his back? His legs?”

The younger man finished chewing. “You mean those weird patches? Or the scars?”

“The patches. It’s like he cut off a patch of skin from his back and replaced it with a patch from someone else.”

The junior detective set down his fork. “Uh-uh. Not someone, something. That back hair,” he made scare quotes around those words, “that hair was too coarse, too thick, too…and did you see? Those patches were mottled, like a jersey cow, or something.”

The senior detective looked at his watch, drank his coffee to the dregs, and stood up. He took a few bills from his wallet and placed them next to his coffee cup. The younger man wiped his face with a napkin, took a drink of milk, and stood. Both men walked out of the diner.

“He didn’t talk much. Well, he’d answer every question I ever put to him.” Moira sat on a sagging, dilapidated sofa. She smoked 100s and flicked the burning end at a large ceramic ashtray atop a scuffed coffee table. The two detectives sat in folding chairs across from her.

“So, how upset are you?” the younger man looked pointedly at Moira.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t seem too broken up right now. Mackey said you were too upset to go to work.”

“Well, to hell with him.” Moira rolled her eyes and curled her lips into a sneer.

“Yet, when we come to see you, you’re only just returning to your apartment.”

Moira glared at the younger man. “What’s it to you? I had an interview. I’m trying to ditch that job.”

“Something wrong with working there?”

“Mr. Mackey is old and gross. But he’s never done anything inappropriate to me. I’m a goddamned vegetarian and I hate coming home smelling like meat.”

“So why work there at all?”

“I was hard up for a job. I needed something or I’d be on the street. Now that I can type, I’m getting something better.”

“What about the kid?” The older detective cut in. “You say you didn’t know him, but you must have known something?”

“Well, I don’t think he was a vegetarian, but he was really weird about his job. Mr. Mackey said he was like an artist or something…”

“He had a gift.”

“Yeah, a gift. Like he’s this great butcher, but he doesn’t like cutting meat.”

“Don’t like cutting meat? Who is this nancy?” the younger man snorted.

“Well, it mostly set in a month or so ago. He just started withdrawing a little at a time, right around the time the special orders started coming in.”

“What special orders? Did Mackey know about these?” The older detective perked up.

“Sure. This old lady would call in these special orders, always wanted them delivered. Seemed to always call right when Mackey went to make the deposit. But we’d write up a receipt which he’d see Monday morning.”

“You say she’d want them delivered? Does Mackey deliver?”

“No, but we’d always do it. She always promised a cash tip if we’d make an exception. The kid would always split it with me on Monday morning. He said she’d always give him some package, too.”

“Package? Brown paper? Tied up with twine?”

“He never told exactly. He just thought it was weird. He’d drop off a package of meat, and she’d give him a package of the same size and weight.”

“So what was in these packages?”

“Don’t know. The kid said he just threw them in his freezer, kind of weirded out about it was the feeling I got.”

“So what did this lady order exactly?”

“Pricey stuff. Veal, mostly. Loins, chops, steaks, liver, you name it. Funny thing. Last time she ordered, all she wanted was a veal heart.”

“A heart? Mackey carry a lot of organ meat?”

“I don’t know what he got in those coolers. The kid says he can take care of it. I don’t know, kind of like he was smitten with this lady.”

“So what happens? She order the veal heart and he just up and croaks?” The younger detective asked.

“Well, I take the order, the kid says he’ll do it. I go up front and finish cleaning up. Next I hear a thud in the back. The kid’s on the floor. On the cutting board is a white package with the heart in it, all wrapped up and ready to go.”

“All right. One last question. You got the name and address of this lady?”

The two detectives stood outside an ornate wooden door inside a posh apartment building. The older stood on the left, on the hinge side, the younger to the right. The junior detective knocked loudly. After a minute, he knocks again, more forcefully. Clopping sounds approach from the other side of the door. The cops hear a high-pitched mewling. The door shifts in its jamb as something rests its weight against it, then, removes it. More mewling.

“I’m going in.” The young cop draws his service weapon. The older detective holds his hand up and touches his partner’s revolver. He lowers his hand to the doorknob and slowly twists. The door swings inward, and confronting the two men is a small, mottled calf.