The Staked Goat Read online

  A slim, light-skinned black woman on my right started a conversation with me. Not pick-up, just pleasant. Unfortunately for her, I wanted to be just a spectator and, fortunately for me, she got asked to dance. I found myself thinking how much this place reminded me of other singles bars in New York and Boston. There were nice people, and noise and dancing, but the smiles were like the ones you flashed for a wedding photographer and the laughs like the ones you trotted out at job interviews. I downed my screwdriver and left.

  It took me about twenty-five minutes to reach Déjà Vu. It looked like a greenhouse someone had tacked onto the Sheraton Hotel it abutted. A clone of the bouncer at the Library welcomed me in, asked if I wished food and drinks, or drinks and dancing, and gave me directions accordingly. I walked through an interior garden, overhung with huge plants of both the flowering and merely multicolored leaf varieties. I could hear swing music coming from around the corner.

  Benny Goodman plays the Amazonian rain forest.

  I turned the corner. The main room was like an airplane hangar. There were twenty or so couples twirling on a huge dance floor. A long bar to the right side of the dance area, tables on two other sides, and a wall with both a grand piano and sound system on the fourth side. People of all ages, skin tones, and dress codes were arrayed around the outer ring of the floor. If I were twenty years older, I think I would have said the joint was jumping.

  The swing song ended, people applauded, and the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” came on. There was a whoop from the bar area to my right, and the world changed over, from 1943 to 1965. Probably two-thirds of the swingers left the floor, and their spaces were swallowed up by four-fifths rockers. A college-looking girl asked me to dance. I declined, a guy about my age next to me said he would, and they went stomping out there. I ordered a vodka and orange from a harried but cheerful waitress, and zigzagged into a cubicle to check my overcoat. I came back to the dance room. I stood and watched and listened as the Stones turned to the Temptations, then to the Beach Boys, then back, as my screwdriver arrived, to I think Glenn Miller and Harry James for one each.

  As nearly as I could tell, the generation gaps in the place were more apparent than real, and everybody was having a ball. I saw my waitress again, and ordered two more drinks to save her a trip.

  A thirtyish woman maybe five-nine came up and said I looked like I wanted to dance. I told her she was clairvoyant. We danced three rock tunes when a slow one came on. I told her thank you and turned away. I found my waitress and got the screwdrivers.

  I danced three or four more times and touched up my waitress maybe twice more for two-handers. I know I grew only dimly aware that the crowd was thinning out and that I was no longer being asked to dance. I also know I had a little trouble finding the men’s room, a little more retrieving my coat, and still a little more finding the front door as the house lights came up to “the-party’s-over” level of brightness. I remember the bouncer asking me if I wanted a cab, but the cold air felt good again, and I waved him off, not quite completing whatever sentence I was saying. Within a few blocks, my eyes grew a bit big for their sockets, the sidewalk a tad slippery from the absence of snow or ice. That struck me funny. That’s why I was having trouble walking. In Boston, there was so much ice and snow on our never-shoveled sidewalks that I was so used to allowing for it that I just couldn’t make the adjustment back to good, old unadulterated.…

  I bounced my head off the concrete before I realized I had been hit. I remember only two of them, but later I was told there were three. I was lying on my left side. The first one I saw was the guy who bent down and sent the left jab at my right eye. I twisted my face left and back and took a glancing shot off my right cheekbone. I sent my right hand cupped, fingers stiff, up into his throat, and he pulled away, gagging and coughing.

  I levered up on my left elbow and got a wicked kick from behind, just to the left of my spinal column and barely missing that kidney. The pain approached paralyzing level. I reached my right hand back and got kicked in my forearm. I forced myself to roll away from the kicker and got my forearms crossed in front of my face just as he delivered his third shot with his right foot. The crotch formed by my forearms absorbed most of the force, but the toe area of his boot caught me just under the chin. I locked my hands around his calf and put my head just outside his right knee. Then I lunged up and forward, driving my shoulder below his knee and pulling his foot into my body to dislocate that joint. I slipped a little, though, and as he and I went down, I felt his ankle and knee just twist funny. He yelled in pain. I took a couple of kicks to my left thigh from somebody else, which didn’t help the cause. Somebody, maybe the new kicker, put an amateurish forearm lock around my throat from behind. I got back onto my knees, and the first kicker rolled and crawled away from me. I whipped my left fist up into the forearm’s groin area but missed the target, him just releasing and running. I realized a car was pulling up, high beams on and horn honking loud and long. I also realized that I was alone on the sidewalk with my wallet intact but my clothes and me somewhat less so.

  “Y’know, ya coulda been dead by now.”

  I pulled the handkerchief away, and inspected the bloodstain. I licked a reasonably clean corner of the cloth and began dabbing. “I appreciate your stopping.”

  The cabbie, beefy, bald, and fiftyish, glanced up at me from his inside rear mirror. “You’re just lucky those three wasn’t good at this yet. No knives. If they’d had knives, they woulda used ’em, and a fuckin’ medical convention couldn’t a helped you then.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, looking down at the holes in the knees of my pants.

  “You bet I am. I spotted those kids. Maybe an hour ago. They was hangin’ around the edge of the retail strip. I knew they was lookin’ for a mark, but the fuckin’ cops can’t do nothing. Used to be the cops would arrest the fuckers or at least roust them. Now, not only won’t the arrest hold up, but the fuckin’ Soo-preem Court’ll let the kids sue the cops. For civil rights violations. You figure it out.”

  “I can’t help you there,” I said. My cheek hurt, my chin and knees burned, and my lower back and thigh ached. Worst of all, the adrenaline rush had sobered me up.

  “Ya sure ya don’t wanna go to the hospital?” asked the cabbie.

  “I’m sure, but thanks.”

  “Hey, citizens gotta stick together. Ya know, lotsa guys, cabbies I mean, woulda seen you get jumped and turned right around. Mebbe two or three I know woulda radioed the dispatcher to send the cops, but that’s it. Me, I think you gotta help. It’s no good to complain about things if you don’t, y’know? Then we’re like animals.” He pulled into the Marriott Key Bridge’s drop-off area and a doorman, just inside the glass, reluctantly put down a magazine and started out toward us.

  “Animals,” continued the cabbie. “Just like those fuckin’ kids that jumped you.”

  I handed him a twenty. “Thanks, my friend.”

  “Thanks, buddy,” replied the cabbie.

  I turned, waved off the blinking doorman, and limped into the hotel lobby.

  Fifteen

  IN THE MOVIES OR on TV, you always see the hero leap up after a brawl and be unmarked and unrestricted the next time he appears. In real life, it doesn’t work that way. Where I grew up in Southie, a lot of the kids went into amateur and then club boxing. Not as many as in the white sections of Dorchester, or almost-all-black Roxbury, but a lot. I remember the kid who lived next door. He was only eighteen years old, but after a particularly tough three-rounder, he would walk, sit, eat, and talk funny for three or four days. You take it easy, use ice, and chew carefully. You rarely call Gidget to go surfing.

  I had put ice on my cheek and thigh when I got in the night before. When I woke up, though, my right rib cage hurt like hell. I couldn’t remember getting hit there, but I showed a fist-sized bruise to match the two on my left thigh. My back ached just enough to tell me there was substantial, but not serious, damage. I did not try to touch my toes. I
moved slowly to the bathroom. No blood in the urine. I turned to the sink. My right cheek, reversed as my left in the mirror, was dull red and purple, not the brighter, almost glossy red and purple you get when you don’t ice it. My chin was scraped and scabby like that of a nine-year-old who had fallen while running during recess. I realized that the ribs must have been the first hit, the one that put me down, because I had only a little swelling on the left side of my head from the bounce off the sidewalk. I thought about the cabbie’s remark on knives, and I suddenly had to use the toilet again.

  I took a long, hot bath and shaved very delicately. I ordered breakfast via room service, no orange juice. The bellboy bringing in the tray did not indicate by word or look that he thought I had been hit by a car. I tipped him a princely sum.

  I chewed breakfast on the left side of my mouth and reached for the telephone.

  Amazingly, I got J.T. right after Ms. Lost-In-Space.

  “Colonel Kivens speaking, sir.”

  “Sir?” I said. “How often do people above colonel call you?”

  “Who is this, please?”

  “Christ, J.T., you sound a lot more—” I stopped. Cold. Al and I’d had such a similar conversation when he called me.

  “Who is this?” said J.T., a bit more aggressively.

  “J.T., it’s John Cuddy. I’m sorry to—”

  “John, how are you? Wait a minute, where are you?”

  “I’m here. In D.C., I mean. I just came in from Pittsburgh. J.T., Al—”

  “I know,” he said quietly. “There was a blurb about it in the Post. I’m really sorry.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Listen, I need some information. I need to know some things about what Al was doing in Vietnam. I’m convinced he wasn’t killed by any—”

  “Listen,” he said assuredly. “Everybody goes there. If I were you though, the one thing I wouldn’t miss is the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I think it’s the best.”

  “If I meet you there, can we talk in the clear?”

  “That’s right,” he said cheerfully.

  “Twelve noon today?”

  “That’s fine. Be sure to see the Spirit of St. Louis. Enjoy your stay, now.”

  “I’ll be the one with the red carnation.”

  He gave a forced chuckle and rang off.

  Terrific. Either J.T. was worried about somebody overhearing what I would say to him about Al or what he would say to me about Al. Or what he would say to anyone about anything. Just terrific.

  I hung up and called the Suffolk County DA’s office. I asked for Nancy Meagher. A secretary came on and said Ms. Meagher was out for the morning. I told her to tell “Ms. Meagher” that Mr. Cuddy had called and would call back later. She thanked me and hung up.

  I propped up some pillows and lay back on them. I thought about calling my “friend” at the insurance company who was supposed to get a guard to watch over Jesse and Emily. My ribs hurt every time I inhaled and only a little less as I exhaled. I thought about calling the D’Amicos and complimenting them on the depth of their son’s loyalty to his brother. I noticed that my thigh didn’t ache when I was lying down. Instead of those calls, or calling Martha and commiserating, or Carol and misleading, or Straun and cursing, I put on the pay-TV channel and watched Clint Eastwood do to about a hundred guys in sequence what I should have done to my three the night before.

  The taxi left me about two hundred feet from the steps of the building. My thigh spasmed every time the left foot hit the ground, but I knew the more I walked on it, the sooner it would loosen up. My back and rib cage would ache for a few days longer.

  It was a clear, bright day, somewhere in the high 40s, which was good, since the seams under both arms on my topcoat were split and hence being repaired back at the hotel or some subcontractor thereof. I had junked my pants, so I was wearing the funeral suit. Gingerly, I climbed the stairs.

  I walked into the crowded lobby. Somehow I’m reluctant to use “museum” to describe a place that has things in it that I remember as current events. The huge Apollo space capsule exhibit was off to the right. A number of airships, from World War I bi-planes to post-Korea jet fighters, were hanging from the ceiling, fifty or sixty feet above my head and suspended in eternal flight. I spotted J.T., in uniform but strolling unmilitarily around the base of the Apollo exhibit while the turistas streamed along a walkway over his head to see into the spacecraft. I edged over to and under Charles Lindbergh’s plane, staring up at it like a little kid in church. Lindbergh was well before my time, and I didn’t mind thinking of his plane being in a museum.

  “A brave man,” said a familiar voice from behind me.

  “Who gave a lot to his country,” I replied.

  J.T. stepped even with me.

  “Sorry about the telephone.”

  “I assumed you had your reasons.”

  He was frowning. “I did. And do. How is Al’s family taking it?”

  “Wife’s O.K., son is too young. Everybody else is dead.”

  I must have sounded pretty despondent, because J.T. didn’t reply right away.

  “What is it you need, John?”

  “Al was killed by somebody who knew what he was doing.”

  “The paper, uh, implied that—”

  “Yeah, I know. But his room at the hotel in Boston was tossed professionally. After he was taken, and maybe even before he was killed. Also, Al called me to set up dinner after some meeting he was going to have. He’d have had no reason to go looking—”

  “Hey, John. Take it easy. I wasn’t implying anything. I just meant the paper—”

  “Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “I know, I know. Let’s walk a little.”

  “I noticed your limp. And your face isn’t exactly yearbook material.”

  “Last night I had a little brush with Washington’s version of the Welcome Wagon.”

  J.T. smiled. “Drunk?”

  I smiled back. “Me, not them.” My cheek hurt a lot when I smiled.

  “So, how can I help you?”

  “The way Al was done, I’m convinced it had to be somebody from Vietnam, somebody he was going to blackmail or something. I think he—”

  “John, that was, what, over thirteen years ago, anyway? Why would Al wait so long.…”

  I shook my head again as we walked in the shadow of an incongruously small but nevertheless life-sized DC-3. “I think it was something that just happened or just suggested itself to him when he hit Boston. He was in desperate financial shape, about to lose his job and probably his house, and I think it was somebody out of the past. I can’t believe that he ran into anybody like that in the steel industry selling widgets, and anyway, I’ve talked to everybody—wife, friends, business associates—not a whiff until he got to Boston.”

  “So you figure that something or someone he saw or knew in Saigon touches him off thirteen years later to blackmail somebody who kills him?”

  I clicked my tongue off the roof of my mouth. “I agree that when you put it that way, it sounds crazy. But I don’t have any other place to start.”

  “Place to start?”

  “Yeah, why I called you. I want to go back into all the records that someone must have at the Pentagon somewhere, the records of Al’s time there. Maybe I can make the same connection Al did.”

  J.T. frowned. “A lot of that stuff gets asked for by writers, researchers, and so forth to make us look worse than they already did back then. We’ve kept a lot of it away from them, even with the Freedom of Information Act, on the grounds that the records are still part of ongoing investigations. If I let you, an outsider—a civilian—see them, and the researchers found out, they’d scream bloody murder, and it’d be my career.”

  I regarded J.T. very carefully. “Are there still ongoing investigations, J.T.?”

  He opened his eyes a little too widely and quickly, then grinned. “John, it was all over, basically, ten years ago. Most of the statutes of limitations have run out by now.”

  “Are the
re still open investigations?”

  “Oh, John,” said J.T., doing a half turn to his right. “You know the Army, there are always investigations of some kind going on.”

  “J.T., look. Al and you and I were friends. We looked out for each other, saved each other’s butts a couple of times. Somebody killed Al, horribly, after torturing him, like the Vietnamese. You’re nobody’s fucking fool and not, even after all this time and a pension so close you can smell it, such a stiff that it doesn’t get to you. Somebody killed our friend. Somebody has to pay for that.”

  J.T. looked grave and sounded stern. “You look, John. This isn’t Saigon, and it isn’t wartime. You can’t get away with things here, and neither can the guy who killed Al, whoever he was. He’ll be discovered eventually and—”

  “Bullshit,” I said, a little too loudly, causing an elderly couple in front of us to jump. I lowered my voice. “The police in Boston have chalked this up as a category crime, and the guy who did it was neat and careful enough so you can’t even blame them. I want a look at those records. If I find something, I’ll check it before I bring in the cops. But that’s all. If this guy could take Al, he can take me, and I’m only looking to even up the ledger. No blood feud, just let justice take its course.”

  J.T. didn’t believe me, but he said, “I’ll have to think it over. I’ll be back in my office by thirteen-hundred.” He pulled out a card with his name and a different direct-dial number on it. “Call me around thirteen-fifteen.”

  He turned and drifted off toward the door, stopping to read a plaque. I sought out a uniformed employee and was directed to the nearest spot for lunch. Soft ice cream and milk.

  I called J.T. at 1:10. He answered.

  “J.T., it’s John.”

  “It’s set. Be here by fourteen-hundred hours. Use your name, my name, and the following three-digit number. The security guard at the first public barrier you come to will call for an escort who’ll bring you in.”