The Staked Goat Page 3

  “Good evening, sir. May I help you?”

  “Yes. Could you buzz Mr. Sachs’ room and tell him Mr. Cuddy is here?”

  “Certainly.” I thought the “certainly” was from a training manual and that the kid would have been more comfortable with “yeah, sure.” In any case, he flipped through a View-dex card holder and picked up the telephone, dialing four digits. He waited ten seconds, then hung up and dialed once more. He shook his head, hung up again, and came back to me.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but he doesn’t answer.”

  I checked my watch. It was 8:20.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m a little early. Can I get a drink somewhere?”

  “Certainly,” as expected and gesturing, “Our lounge is right through there. Would you like me to leave a message for Mr. Sachs to join you?”

  “If I could have a piece of paper.”

  “Certainly.” He slid a message pad and Bic pen to me. I wrote, “If I had to wait for you, guess where?” I decided it sounded arch, so I crumpled it and wrote, “I’m in the bar.” I folded it and gave it to the kid, who stuck it in a slot with 304 under it. I went past a bank of pay phones with swing-up directories and into the lounge.

  It was dark and nearly empty. A pianist was playing gamely in a corner. A fortyish waitress in black mesh tights brought me a screwdriver. Two half-bagged jerks were hitting on a couple of secretaries with adventures centering around the wholesale hardware game in Wichita. Just as I was thinking of buying a newspaper, the barman turned the lights down another notch.

  I was nearly finished with my second drink. My watch said 9:10. The secretaries had split, and the salesmen from Wichita began singing their version of “I Gotta Be Me.” The piano player looked like he wished he had been born tone-deaf. I drained my glass, paid my check, and walked back to the lobby.

  The same kid was on duty. When he saw me coming, he turned to look at the message box.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Sachs hasn’t come back.” I asked the kid to ring Al’s room again. No answer.

  I went to one of the pay phones and called my home number. I took the remote unit for my telephone tape machine from my jacket pocket and waited for my taped outgoing message to start at the other end. When I heard my own voice, I beeped the device once into the speaker of the phone and heard my machine rewind and play back. No messages. I beeped again to reset the machine and hung up.

  I walked back to the kid and asked if he had a newspaper I could borrow. He handed me an evening Globe, which I read cover to cover while seated in an overly upholstered lobby chair. At 10:15, I got up and returned it to him.

  “May I have your pad again, please?”

  “Certainly.”

  I had been composing my message mentally for twenty minutes. “I trust your deal was big enough to justify crushing the spirit of your dearest friend.” I signed it, “Your loyal servant, J. F. Cuddy, P.O.,” for “pissed off.” I wrote “10:15 p.m.” under that, folded it, and asked the clerk to substitute it for the message in Al’s box. The clerk said he was sorry. I left the Midtown, gathered my car, drove home, and hit the sack. I didn’t bother setting the alarm.

  Four

  I WOKE UP THE next morning without a hangover. It was light outside, and the clock said 9:20. I rolled over, realized I was slept out, and decided to jog the river. I clicked on the all-news radio station to see how many layers of warmth I would need.

  “... Maxwell canning the winning shot with twelve seconds left in regulation. Over to you, Marcie.”

  “Thank you, Tom. And repeating this morning’s top stories, President Reagan warns the Soviets that arms limitation now depends on them, and the nude, mutilated body of an unidentified man is found on Beacon Hill.”

  She continued on about staying tuned for Greg Somebody and the weather, but I wasn’t listening anymore. There was a little lump at the back of my throat and a tug in my stomach. No good reason to think the man was Al, despite the proximity of the body. The statistics were far the other way. But Al was Al, and Al always showed.

  Short-circuiting an hour of internal argument, I picked up the telephone and dialed the Boston police.

  Two fifteen-inch sphinxes crouch at the head of the staircase in that Boston City Hospital building. Down the stairs is a tomb of sorts, but not the grand, permanent kind their giant cousins guard in Egypt. No Pharaohs here, only transients.

  We went down the stairs. A set of bright-red double doors led to an anteroom. A white-coated clerk behind a desk nodded to my companion, then returned to entering information from a clipboard onto file cards.

  The anteroom was chilly, osmosis from the year-round frigidity of the next room beyond a second set of double doors. The wall tiles were a sickly, pastel green, the floor easily swabbed, single-sheet linoleum. I sat in a molded plastic chair. There was a fluorescent light blinking above me and a young homicide detective blinking across from me. His name was Daley, blue-eyed and sandy-haired. My watch said 11:30 a.m., and the eighteen or so hours he had been away from his bed were taking their toll.

  We were waiting for Lieutenant Robert J. Murphy, who was in charge, to drive in from his home. I already had asked if I could see the body just for identification purposes, but Daley had said Murphy had left strict orders no one was to see the body without Murphy himself being present. So we waited.

  For distraction’s sake, I tried to remember why Murphy’s name stuck in my mind. It was common enough and I had never met him, yet …

  The swinging double doors boomed open and a heavyset black man blew through them. He had maybe ten years on me, I maybe two inches on him. “C’mon,” he said to the morgue attendant and the two of us as we rose from our chairs.

  “Lieutenant Murphy,” said Daley to me as we trailed behind.

  The body room itself was twenty degrees colder and snow-blind white. The walls were honeycombed with eighty or ninety slightly oversized file cabinet fronts. The attendant checked his clipboard, then approached one of the fronts. Shaking his head, he moved to the next and gripped the handle. He yanked down and out, stepping aside as the slab on its casters snicked smoothly outward at chest level.

  I stifled an urge to grab for the drawer before it slid completely out of the wall and spilled its contents at our feet. An unseen brake, however, stopped it abruptly, the whole device vibrating with a soft metallic hum in the otherwise silent room.

  Murphy and the attendant were on one side, Daley and I on the other. It was as though a headwaiter had led us to our table and no one wanted to be the first to sit.

  Murphy spoke. “Pull the sheet to his knees.” The attendant, with a too-often-practiced flourish, whipped the cover down. My eyes didn’t quite focus, then they did and my head involuntarily jerked up and away. I realized I had been holding my breath, so I exhaled and forced my eyes downward again.

  It was Al. Almost. He had less hair than I remembered, and more stomach, but those weren’t the major changes. Whoever had done him had used a cigarette to burn his upper torso. There were burns showing also on his genitals, which had been slashed repeatedly, probably by a straight razor. The burns continued on his throat, lips, ears, and eyes. The eyelids had been burned away almost completely. I looked at his right hand. It seemed untouched. I couldn’t see his left hand from where I was standing.

  “Recognize him?” grunted Murphy.

  I glanced up at him and came around the slab. “Yeah,” I said, bumping rudely into him, “just barely.”

  The attendant backed away and Daley from behind clamped firmly on both my arms. I swung my head around as if to glare at Daley too, but I was mainly interested in Al’s left hand. I caught an unmistakable frame of his left pinky finger. It was bent nearly 90 degrees toward the rest of the hand.

  I looked back at Murphy. He wore a grim smile.

  “Let’s go,” he said. Murphy wheeled and left the room. Daley released his grip, and we followed. I took an involuntary extra step as the slab slammed shut into the wall behind us. As
we walked, I thought very carefully about how to handle Murphy.

  When you decide not to tell the whole truth, it is far better to tell nearly the whole truth. It’s easy to get tripped up in a series of lies, because sooner or later the interrogator will uncover one of them. So if you have something to hide, simply omit it, and otherwise tell the truth. I remembered that from MP interrogation training.

  I also remembered why Murphy’s name meant something to me. Some years ago, the word was that a city councilor had vowed never to see a black reach the grade of lieutenant detective, Boston’s department always putting rank (;Lieutenant”) before duty (;Detective”). Oh, it was all right to have them in uniform, and strut them on appropriate holidays in the poorer, blacker neighborhoods. But a plain-clothes lieutenant, especially in Homicide, never. Well, it seemed that some liberals had enough pull to put Robert J. Murphy’s name on the promotion list and to get it, because of the Irish last name, past the councilman’s informal, backroom veto. At the promotion ceremony, said councilman hit the roof. He later saw to it that Murphy was assigned to Beacon Hill, residential area of many liberals and rich folks, where Murphy could fuck up royally in front of those who thought they knew more than the councilman. As it turned out, however, said Murphy knew his stuff, and said councilman was eventually defeated for re-election for a hundred other reasons.

  Said Murphy now sat across from me, or, more accurately, I sat across his desk from him. A female detective named Cross had replaced the exhausted young Daley. Murphy didn’t look exhausted, maybe because of his environment. His office was a degree or two colder than the morgue had been.

  I repeated for Cross the background information of how I came to know Al Sachs, his phone call to me, and my futile visit to his hotel.

  “You realize, Cuddy,” said Murphy, “that this has all the characteristics of a gay killing, either a ritual or a psycho.” It was not a question.

  “I haven’t seen Al for years,” I replied, “but I am certain he wasn’t gay. He had plenty of opportunities in Saigon, including me, and he never hinted at it.”

  Murphy sighed. “The medical examiner’s preliminary actual cause of death, despite the mutilations, was smothering.” Murphy flipped open a folder on his desk, scanned for a second, then read, “Probably a pillow impregnated with a chemical, tentatively identified as a men’s cologne called Aramis.” Murphy closed the folder. “A lot of gay men use Aramis.”

  I watched Murphy carefully. No hint of discrimination or distaste. Just a fact. Many Beacon Hill residents were gay. Murphy probably grew up in a neighborhood like I had, where a mere allusion toward homosexuality would cost a kid his teeth. Along the way he had learned to change, if not an attitude, at least the appearance of an attitude.

  I shook my head. “No, the method of it is just a cover for something else.”

  “Like what?” said Murphy, quite reasonably.

  “I don’t know. I’d had only one call from the guy in the last year. I have no idea what reason somebody would have for singling him out.”

  His phone rang. “Lieutenant Detective Murphy, Homicide.” Good telephone manner, an executive evaluator would say.

  “Be right over. Nobody in or out. You included.”

  Murphy told Cross to get her coat. As she left the room, he grabbed his from a worn coat tree of indeterminable wood and said to me, “Uniforms have secured Sachs’ hotel room. You wanna come?”

  I thanked him and fell in behind him.

  The three of us entered the lobby. A uniformed cop was flirting with an attractive blond desk clerk who stood in place of the kid I had dealt with last night.

  “Keller,” said Murphy, beckoning to the uniform. Keller trotted over to us.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Which room?” asked Murphy.

  “Three-oh-four.” Keller gave me a once-over. “Mackey’s guarding it.”

  “Come with us.”

  “Yessir.”

  “If you can be spared here,” Murphy said.

  “Yessir,” said Keller. I couldn’t tell if Keller had caught the sarcasm.

  After two corridor turns, we reached Room 304. Another young uniform, a black man with a thin mustache, was standing four rooms down.

  “Mackey,” barked Murphy. Mackey trotted to us. I had the feeling that a lot of people trotted to Murphy. “What the hell are you doing down the hall?”

  “You told us to secure 304, sir. From where I was, I could watch 304 and maybe someone would approach it, thinking I was doing something else.”

  A smile began on Murphy’s lips before he banished it. I figured a small star would go next to Mackey’s name in a ledger book somewhere.

  “Fill us in,” said Murphy to Mackey. Mackey stated they’d received the call from Murphy through the dispatcher to come here, arrived at 12:06 p.m., checked with the desk clerk, had her open the room. They peered inside, saw nothing striking, then relocked the door, Mackey remaining at the door, Keller returning to the desk with the clerk.

  “Twelve-oh-six.” Murphy turned to Keller. “Was that before or after the maid came?”

  Keller swallowed and reddened. “I don’t know.”

  Mackey interceded. “Lieutenant, the maid for this corridor saw me by the door. She said she had opened 304, looked in, and saw it hadn’t been slept in, so she moved on.”

  Murphy nodded. “Cross, you and Keller go back to that clerk. Find out whether anybody else has been in or out of the room, and anything else about the room.”

  “Lieutenant?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “When I was here last night, a college-age boy was on desk duty. He’d probably started work in the afternoon. That means someone relieved him before the present clerk came on, unless clerks work twelve-hour shifts here. Maybe the names and even home addresses and telephones of all of them would be helpful.”

  “I would have gotten that information anyway,” said Cross, a bit defensively.

  “Fine,” said Murphy. “Check on rent-a-car, too.”

  Cross and Keller started off down the hall. “O.K.,” said Murphy, “take your shoes off.” Mackey and I did so. Murphy pointed to the door, and Mackey keyed the lock and swung the door open. We looked in for maybe twenty seconds before Murphy led us over the threshold.

  We strolled around, looking here and there without touching. Murphy took out a pencil and pushed the accordion doors of the closet open. A battered garment bag hung in there, nothing else.

  I went into the bathroom. Toilet articles were spread out on the sink area. Funny how little a man’s habits change over the years. I closed my eyes and pictured how our place in Saigon would have looked. I opened my eyes. Certain items outside of the toilet kit. Right Guard stick instead of Right Guard spray, but the same shaving cream. Twin-bladed floating head instead of the adjustable “track” razor. Toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash all the same.

  Inside the kit … I could peer inside, without touching, because the kit was unzipped. I expect I frowned.

  “Notice something?” said Murphy. I looked at me in the mirror as I turned my head left toward him.

  “I don’t know. Can I ask Mackey a question?”

  “Sure. Mackey?”

  Mackey’s face appeared behind Murphy’s.

  “Mackey, did the maid say she left the room untouched or just that she didn’t bother with the still-made bed?”

  Mackey closed his eyes and answered with them shut. “I asked her, ‘Had you cleaned the room?’ She replied, ‘No, the place hadn’t been used, so I moved on to 302.’ ”

  Murphy was staring at me. I spoke. “Can you find out if she touched anything in here today?”

  Mackey looked at Murphy. Murphy nodded, and Mackey was off.

  “Good cop,” I said.

  “He’ll be better when he can repeat an exchange without having to keep his eyes shut. What’s up?”

  I sighed. “Maybe nothing, but when we lived together, he always kept the toilet kit zipped up.”


  Murphy looked at it. “When I was in the Army, I did too. When I got home, I didn’t bother.”

  “Like I said, maybe nothing.”

  He turned and went back into the main room. I leaned over the tub and looked up at the vent above the shower. There were some bright nicks around the screws holding it. I decided I would ask the hotel staff about recent maintenance myself.

  We carefully opened drawers and looked under the bed. Mackey returned to report that the maid never even entered 304 that morning. Cross and Keller provided us with the names and addresses of the clerks and bellhops on duty. Cross also reported that Al had made the reservation at the Midtown eleven days earlier and had checked in at 11:30 a.m., Monday, the 22nd. The day before yesterday. He had stayed there Monday night, but apparently not Tuesday night. No one had seen him enter or leave on Tuesday. He had placed two long distance calls to Pittsburgh, presumably home and office, and two local calls, me and presumably a customer, early Tuesday morning.

  “Was my message to him still in the box?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Cross handed it to Murphy. He glanced at it and gave it back to her.

  Murphy told Mackey to lock and seal the room, Cross remaining to go through it with the lab technicians she had called from the desk.

  “C’mon,” Murphy said to me. It seemed to be one of his favorite phrases. We walked back through the lobby to his car.

  “Unless the lab comes up with something, this one’s going down as what it appears to be.”

  We were stopped at a light. I chose my answering words carefully, the autopsy I had just witnessed still vivid in my mind.

  “I still don’t see it that way, Lieutenant. Al wasn’t gay.”

  “Maybe he’d gotten a little drunk.” The light changed and we eased forward in the traffic that is a constant of Boston driving during all daylight hours. “He gets a little drunk, some guys talk about having a good time, he thinks combat-zone bar or hookers, realizes the real scene a little too late. Maybe he gets insulting and somebody gets mad.”

  “First, Al was too smart and experienced not to recognize something like that. Second—” I was interrupted by Murphy’s horn as a bread truck tried to slam us broadside. I started over. “Second, what was done to him is pretty extreme for somebody getting mad.”