The Staked Goat Read online

  “John Cuddy, Jesse. You called me. Last night sometime.”

  “Oh, John, please excuse me. I … that is, we’ve been a little upset.”

  I felt my stomach turn maybe 15 degrees.

  “What’s happened?” I asked.

  “Well, yesterday the phone rang and Emily answered. Hold on, John, she’s right here, let me put her on so she can tell you.”

  “John? Hello?” She sounded shaken.

  “I’m here, Emily. What’s the trouble?”

  “Well, yesterday about noontime, the phone rang. I picked it up and said ‘Hello’ and a man’s voice said ‘Hi, Emily. How are you?’ I said, ‘I’m fine.’ Before I could ask who it was, the voice said, real smooth and creamy, ‘That’s good.’ Then he hung up.”

  “Was it Marco D’Amico’s voice?”

  Jesse came back on. “We couldn’t tell, it was so soft. The man, that is, spoke so softly.”

  “Did you hear him too, Jesse?”

  Jesse coughed. “Well, not that time, no, but he’s called four times since, and each time he asks me—I won’t let Emily answer anymore—he asks me how Emily is and then says ‘That’s good’ or ‘That’s nice.’ Then hangs up. In fact,” said Jesse haltingly, “we get so few calls, I figured your call was him calling again.”

  “Any sign of Marco?”

  “We haven’t been out of the house since the first call. I looked up and down the street but I can’t tell from the window whether he’s out there.”

  “All right,” I said. “Here’s what I want you to do. Don’t answer the telephone unless it rings twice, stops, and rings immediately again. That’ll be me. I’m going to call some people. Then I’m going to drive over to you and check out the streets around you. O.K.?”

  I heard both of them speak. “Right, O.K., thank you, John.”

  I hung up. I thumbed through the blue pages of the phone book for the police district station closest to the Coopers. I reached for a pen and realized that I hadn’t played back my telephone tape after my run. I rewound it, heard a message in reverse Donald-Duck talk, and replayed it. A short message.

  “Hi, John, how are you? Oh, you’re fine. That’s nice.”

  Click.

  I looked up the Suffolk DA’s number.

  The secretary who answered Nancy Meagher’s phone said Nancy was on pre-trials all morning. I thanked her and left a message that I’d appreciate a return call when Nancy was available.

  I drummed my fingers on the desk, then called directory assistance for three area codes before I got the number for the Pentagon main switchboard, the last duty-station I remembered J.T. having. I went through ten or twelve holds and transfers before I got “Colonel Kivens’ office.”

  “May I speak with him?”

  “I’m sorry, but the Colonel is not available.” Her voice sounded as though she was reading instructions, a Stepford secretary.

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Is the next line in the script ‘I’ll be happy to take your name and number and ask him to call you’?”

  “What?”

  At least an honest response. I couldn’t very well leave a “your friend is dead” message, though. “Just tell him John Cuddy called and will call again tomorrow.”

  “Would you kindly spell that last name, please?”

  I did. And got a direct dial number back to him. I hung up, donned my coat, and headed outside.

  I walked to Park Square and rented a car to drive incognito to Jesse and Emily’s neighborhood. Their part of Dorchester had a simple, gridlike street pattern, with cars parked on both sides of each road. I edged the rent-a-car through the neighborhood in ever-decreasing concentric squares. Marco might have been there somewhere, but I couldn’t spot him.

  I drove down the Coopers’ short street and then back up it. I parallel-parked a few doors from their house and watched for fifteen minutes. Still no Marco.

  I left and locked the car and knocked on the Coopers’ back door. They let me in, Jesse self-consciously cradling the shotgun in his good hand. Emily had been crying.

  “Did the telephone ring since I spoke with you?”

  Emily said “Twice,” sobbed and turned away. Jesse looked at me helplessly.

  “Come on,” I said, moving toward their telephone. They sat in front of me on their couch as I began to dial.

  First, I called a friend at New England Telephone’s business office and set the wheels in motion for a changed, unlisted number. Jesse looked at Emily, who managed a small smile.

  Second, I called the guy at the insurance company that I was working for when I nailed Marco’s brother. I gave him a five-minute lecture on the good citizenship of the Coopers and how much money their cooperation had helped his company to save on the claim. I asked him to approve a private security guard for the Coopers. He said he doubted his boss would go for it, but he’d try, and would call me at home with the answer.

  I checked the white pages. There were fifteen D’Amicos in the book, but there was only one on Hanover Street, in the North End. I called the number and got a heavily accented, older voice. I said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and hung up.

  I looked up at Jesse and Emily. They seemed much brighter. I sighed and told them a close friend from the Army had died here in Boston and that I had to go to Pittsburgh.

  Jesse nodded gravely, thinking, I expect, of his own outfit from World War II. Emily squeezed his good hand tighter.

  I told them to call me again if anything more happened. They said they would and thanked me again for all I had done for them.

  All I had done for them.

  I got in my car and started toward the North End via the Central Artery. I felt anger toward the elder D’Amicos for no good reason. I decided to cool off a little first with a different kind of visit.

  In February you can’t see any sailboats from her hillside. Her first year there, we had an early spring. Then, a few brave souls, probably amateurs, were out by the last week of March.

  “This year, I’d bet April 10th at the earliest, Beth.”

  Before she’d gotten the cancer, or at least before we knew she had it, we would visit Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts once every few months. I always preferred paintings, Beth sculpture. Whenever we entered a room of sculpture, she would stand for fifteen minutes in front of one piece, say a smallish Greek statue, while I would wander around the room. Whenever I got back to her, she would be ready to go on to the next room. She always said she preferred studying one piece of work in detail. I never had the patience to stare at one piece of stone for that kind of time.

  Until I lost her.

  For months after Beth was buried, I would look only at her ground, not the headstone. Now I would notice the slightest additional scratch on her marker. A relative of hers, an old man, advised me at the wake to shy away from polished marble. He said that, despite its hardness, it always showed nicks and after ten months would look like it had been in the graveyard for ten years.

  He may have been right. I tried to believe the marks around her name and years were natural aging, caused by cold and rain or windblown branches. More likely, they were the product of carelessly swung rakes or tossed beer bottles. But, she gently reminded me, I wasn’t keeping to the point.

  “You’re right, kid. Al—Al Sachs—is dead. I identified the body this morning. Someone tortured and mutilated him, Beth. The police are treating it as a gay murder, but I don’t think so. He called me Tuesday morning and planned a dinner with me. He sounded nervous. No, more than nervous. Scared.” I thought about that. In Vietnam we’d both been scared often enough, but I could never remember Al sounding scared. That was the edge in his voice that I noticed but didn’t recognize yesterday.

  “In addition to sounding scared, somebody searched his room. A pro. He left nothing out of order that anyone would especially notice.” I left out the part about the guy who might have checked my pink mess
age slip.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea why it happened, kid. He was living and working out of Pittsburgh for a steel company, and this was the first time he’d been in Boston for years.”

  She told me it wasn’t my fault. Agreeing with her helped only a little. “Anyway, I’m going to be taking him home to Pittsburgh. Our flight is tonight at six-fifty. So I won’t be coming by for a while.”

  The wind rose up, blowing a little sleet in front of it. I turned up my collar and hunkered down on my haunches. I touched her grave with the fingers of my right hand.

  “Give Al my best,” I said.

  Hanover Street is the main drag of the North End. Tourists and people from other parts of the Boston area cruise it, futilely searching for a parking place near the dozens of Italian restaurants which lie along or just off it. Most of the buildings have a commercial first floor, often a bakery or butcher shop. The remaining floors are apartments. In good weather, the women, young, middle-aged, and old, lean out of windows with their elbows on the sills.

  On street level, the men, also of all ages, congregate in knots of three to five on the sidewalk. Some sit in folding lawn chairs, most talk in staccato Italian. Few pay much attention to non-neighborhood people walking by. A lot of Bostonians maintain that the North End is the safest neighborhood in the city.

  Seven-sixty-seven Hanover had a small insurance agency on the ground floor. I walked to the doorway next to it and pressed the D’Amicos’ bell. The door was painted dark gray, with six stained-glass inserts. I waited two minutes and pressed again. Still no answer. The sleet had blown over, and the sun was out. It was nearly forty degrees, and I felt a little warm in my overcoat.

  One of four men talking in front of the bakery next door broke off and walked toward me. He was short and stubby, wearing a heavy, blue knit sweater over black dress slacks. He appeared to be about my age, and he neither frowned nor smiled.

  “Who you lookin’ for?” he asked me.

  “The D’Amicos,” I said.

  “Which ones?” he replied.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Joey and Marco’s parents.”

  “The D’Amicos,” he said. “They had a lotta heartache this week. Maybe they don’t wanna see nobody just now, y’know?”

  “I know, and I can understand it. That’s why I want to see them.”

  He squinted. “You ain’t a cop, are ya?”

  “No,” I said. “If I were a cop, I would have ignored you and kept pressing their button.”

  He rubbed his nose. Then he leaned in front of me and gave their button three quick taps. He looked me square in the eye. “My parents and the D’Amicos come over together. The parents are good people. I went to school with Marco. I don’t know which of the sons give ’em more trouble, Marco or Joey. Just don’t add to it.”

  “I’m here to prevent trouble for them.”

  My emissary broke eye contact as the downstairs door opened. Mr. D’Amico poked his red-eyed head outside. He recognized me and snarled something in Italian to my companion that contained Joey’s name.

  My companion stiffened and started, “Mr. D’Amico says you’re—”

  “I’m not here about Joey,” I interrupted sharply. “I’m here about Marco, and I need to talk with Mr. and Mrs. D’Amico.” I lowered my voice. “Please tell him it’s important.”

  Mr. D’Amico spoke. “He don’t need to tell me no thing. I understand English. If you about Marco, we will talk. Upstairs.”

  Mr. D’Amico turned and I stopped the spring-held door as he started up the narrow staircase.

  As I stepped across the threshold, my emissary caught my arm. Not hard or threatening, just a firm grip.

  “When you come out, nobody up there better be cryin’.”

  I looked over his shoulder at the knot of men he’d left. They were all staring at us. I looked down as steadily as I could at my emissary, who bobbed his head once and released my arm. I followed D’Amico up the stairway, the closing door darkening the passage.

  Their living room was clean, dry, and awfully warm with all the windows closed. The sofa and chairs were overstuffed, with elaborate crocheted doilies on the arms and backs. Religious scenes dotted the walls, and I could make out photos of younger Marcos and Joeys in triptych brass frames standing on the end tables.

  D’Amico sat stiffly on the couch. I was in a flower-print chair across from him. He wore an old, narrow-collar white shirt and brown sharkskin pants. I could neither see nor hear Mrs. D’Amico.

  “I have no desire to add to your grief, Mr. D’Amico,” I began, “but I would like to speak with your wife as well.”

  D’Amico swallowed twice. He barely unclenched his teeth. “She too upset from the … from the trial. You tell me what you want.”

  I frowned and spread out my hands. “Look, Mr. D’Amico, like I said downstairs, I’m here about Marco, not Joey, but in order for me to do any good here, you have to accept something about Joey. You have to—”

  “I don’t need to accept no thing,” D’Amico cut in tremulously.

  “Yes, sir. Yes, you do. You have to accept that you’ve lost Joey. You have to accept that if you want to save Marco.”

  “Save Marco?” said a little, tired voice from a corridor we’d passed. “What save Marco?”

  D’Amico got up with a pained look on his face and walked toward his wife, who stood small and trembling with her hand clutching a black bathrobe at her breast. Her hair, more gray than black, was askew, and the hem of a white nightgown or slip hung out under the robe. Her face looked sunburned. In February.

  D’Amico spoke soothingly in Italian but his wife was having none of it, wagging her head and stomping into the room and toward me.

  “What save Marco?” she demanded. “What—” Then a flash of recognition. “You. You the one. Joey! Oh, Madre di Dio!” She clenched the fist that wasn’t holding the robe together and struck herself hard on the chest repeatedly until her husband restrained her.

  “Mrs. D’Amico …”

  She shrieked and shook her head violently. She began to wail. “Why you here? Why you don’t leave us alone? Why, Why?”

  “To try to save Marco for you, Mrs. D’Amico,” I said softly. “To try to save your other son.”

  She was trembling but stopped crying. She glared at me, her nostrils flaring. She gave her husband a short command in Italian. He protested, and she switched to English. “Sit, sit!”

  He gave me a murderous look and released her arm. They took the sofa.

  “What you mean, save Marco?”

  I decided not to repeat my Joey preamble. “Mrs. D’Amico, have you seen Marco since yesterday afternoon?”

  She bit her lip. “What you mean, save Marco?”

  I thought of the Little Prince, who once he asked a question, would keep asking it until it was answered. I decided to play, too.

  “Mrs. D’Amico, have you seen him?”

  She bit her lip again and moved her head “no.” I looked up at her husband, who glared, but showed “no” as well.

  “I have reason to believe Marco is bothering the older couple whose house I used to watch the warehouse.”

  “The colored and the white woman?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What you mean, bother?” she said.

  “Phone calls.”

  “Look,” said Mr. D’Amico, “Marco, he don’t live here no more. He don’t make no phone calls from here.”

  “It doesn’t matter where he’s calling from,” I explained. “If he threatens them, he gets in trouble with the police.”

  “Marco don’t make those calls,” said Mrs. D’Amico.

  “I think he did. He called me, too. It was his voice, Mrs. D’Amico.”

  “No,” she said, then louder, “NO!”

  “Why you telling us this things,” said Mr. D’Amico warily.

  “I was hoping you could talk to him, persuade him to stop before he gets in trouble for it.”

  D’Amico looked helple
ss. His wife sunk her face into her free hand, and then went to her pocket, tugging out some crumpled Kleenex to stem the next wave of tears.

  “He don’t listen no more,” said the husband. “He almost as old as you. He don’t listen.”

  Mrs. D’Amico was crying again, choking off sobs in her throat.

  “The Coopers, the other couple, are a lot like you. Only they don’t have neighbors to look after them, like you do. You can guess why that is. Cooper, the husband, was a Marine. He can take care of Marco if he has to. So can I.”

  “Marco got friends,” he said aggressively. “Lotsa friends.”

  “I know,” I said. “I met one downstairs, remember? But his friends won’t back him on this sort of thing. This isn’t vendetta, Mr. D’Amico. We both know that. Joey set fire to that warehouse and left the watchman to die. I shot Joey because he shot at me. If Marco hurts someone because of that, nobody will stand with him. Nobody will avenge him, and you’ll have lost both of your sons.”

  Mrs. D’Amico let out a confirming wail.

  “Out!” snapped D’Amico. “You, outta my house!”

  I got up and left the apartment. I closed the door gently behind me and descended the staircase. As I stepped out into the sunlight, I looked over at my emissary. He and the group stared back at me. I nodded without smiling and walked back toward my car. I was glad the D’Amicos’ closed windows kept her crying from drifting down to street level.

  Seven

  I DROVE BACK TOWARD my apartment. I circled around my block twice, then parked two blocks away and walked to a coffee shop roughly diagonal to my building. I sat and nursed a hot cocoa for half an hour in a bay window, watching. I didn’t see anything unusual, like someone parked in a car for an unreasonable period of time.

  I paid for my cocoa and crossed the street. I walked quietly down the alley that turned behind my building, and peeked around the corner. Nobody in sight.

  I walked behind my building and hopped over the wooden fence separating our minimal patio area from the alley tar. I used my key on the back door and pulled a long-handled, wide-brushed push broom from the utility closet with the broken lock. I went back outside and lifted the wood brush angle to hook and pull down the last ladder flight of the fire escape. I climbed it, carrying the broom.