The Staked Goat Page 6

  I reached my floor and thought about using the handle end of the broom to poke around my window sill from a safe distance. Instead I crawled to my window and looked inside. I couldn’t see much, but I watched long enough to be fairly certain no one was waiting for me. I took out my penlight and shined it through the glass toward the front entrance. I couldn’t see any wires or trips attached to the door.

  I didn’t think Al’s killer would really try anything for two reasons. First, any attempt on my life, once the police knew I was connected with Al, would put the lie to the cover-up he had arranged. Second, he couldn’t be sure that Al hadn’t somehow identified him to me, resulting in his being put under surveillance by the police. While I believed that either or both of those reasons relieved me of Al’s killer, I didn’t feel as comfortable about my friend Marco. Hence, my caution.

  I flicked off the light and was halfway back down the escape when the cruiser came into the alley and stopped. Both uniforms, a man and a woman, came out of their respective doors and drew and pointed their revolvers at me, bracing their gun hands with their free ones.

  “All right, leave the broom there and come down real slow,” said the woman, who had been driving.

  “Is it all right if I just drop the broom over the side?” I said. “It’ll save us having to stand on each other’s shoulders to pull the flight down to climb back up after it.”

  The male uniform muttered something to her. Neither took their eyes off me.

  She spoke. “Drop the broom. Then cut the shit. And then come down.”

  I dropped, cut, and came.

  They studied my investigator’s identification and compared it to the address information in my wallet several times before grudgingly buying my explanation of Marco’s dishonorable intentions. It seemed that a woman sitting in her apartment across the alley had spotted me climbing up the fire escape. As they got back into their cruiser, I felt encouraged by neighborhood security and embarrassed by personal ineptitude, with the edge to embarrassment.

  I walked around to the front of the building. I keyed open the door and approached my apartment more conventionally.

  Once inside I checked my telephone tape. There were two hang-ups and two messages. The first message was:

  “John, it’s Nancy Meagher returning your call at three-forty p.m. I’ll be in my office tomorrow between eight-thirty and nine-thirty.”

  The second message was a little redundant:

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

  I rewound and then levered out the message cassette. I replaced it with a spare and put the tape into a padded manila envelope. I checked my watch. Four-thirty. I called Nancy’s office. She was gone for the day and so was her secretary. I looked for her home phone number in the book, but if I remembered her address correctly, she was unlisted. I penned a quick explanatory note and slipped it in next to the tape. I addressed the envelope to Nancy at the DA’s office, stamped it, and left it on a table near the door for mailing.

  Then I called Lieutenant Detective Murphy’s office. I got Daley, my companion at the morgue. He said Murphy was out of the office, but that Murphy had told him to tell me that Traffic had found Al’s rental car on Myrtle Street on Beacon Hill and about five blocks from where Al’s body had been dumped. Elapsed mileage exceeded by about fifty miles the business visits they could confirm Al making. None of the business contacts knew where he was going that evening. The final autopsy report confirmed death by smothering, no further information. I thanked Daley and told him I would be in Pittsburgh for a few days and would call in once in a while. I rang off and walked into the front hall.

  I went to the closet and pushed most of the garbage aside. I pulled out the old Samsonite three-suiter, even though I would have to pack only one outfit. A dark, somber one.

  After that, I carried the suitcase to the door and looked down at the envelope. I pocketed it and went downstairs.

  I walked to the rental and returned it to the agency. I carried my burdens to the Szechuan Chinese restaurant in the next block. The decor was red leather with faintly illuminating Chinese lanterns. There were few patrons. I was shown to a small booth by a hostess in a cocktail dress, slit discreetly up the side. I ordered a vodka and orange juice.

  One screwdriver makes me thirsty for two. Two make me hearty and gregarious. Three make me unnecessarily aware of little things, like the exact shade of a woman’s lipstick. Four make me morose.

  I stopped at three and ate my dinner. I also decided not to mail the tape envelope. I settled up and stepped out into a howling wind. I hailed a cab, giving Nancy’s address in Southie.

  The taxi driver had country and western music on the radio. The back seat was black vinyl with little tufts of white, puffy stuffing poking through. I thought of Craigie’s body after the fire, then made my mind change the subject.

  Her building in South Boston was a three-decker on a clean street, sort of a wooden version of the D’Amicos’ place. Like the Italian North End, the Irish and Italian neighborhoods in Southie had been stable, if stubborn, for generations. A Lithuanian section, dating mostly from the end of World War II, straddled Broadway a little farther west.

  There were three buzzers arranged vertically on the outside doorjamb. Each would signify a different floor of the three-story house. The bottom and middle name plates said “M. Lynch” and “A. Lynch.” The top one said “N. Meagher.” I pushed it. Strains from some detestable C&W song reached me through the cabbie’s half-open window, something like “I’m breaking my back putting up a front for you.”

  I heard footsteps tripping down the stairs inside the door, and a light flicked on over my head. No intercom and buzzer systems in this part of town. The door opened on a chain, and I heard her laugh.

  “Well, well,” she said, slipping the chain and swinging open the door. “A pleasure call, I hope.”

  She was wearing a gray Red Sox T-shirt and white tennis shorts. A bath towel, draped clumsily, covered her left hand from the wrist down.

  I said, “I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I have a plane to catch, and I wanted to talk with you before I left.”

  She went up on tiptoes and saw the cabbie over my shoulder. She shivered a bit. “Pay off your cab and come on up. I’ll freeze in this doorway, but I’d be glad to drive you to Logan afterwards.”

  As I turned back toward the cab, I heard her say, “It’s okay, Drew.” Someone moved on the second landing, and a door closed.

  I settled with the driver and lugged my suitcase to her stoop. She tapped ahead of me in sandals up the two flights to her apartment.

  Her door opened from the staircase into a big kitchen, perhaps fifteen by fifteen. A screened-in but sealed-off porch lay behind the kitchen. Once inside, I dropped my bag on the floor, and we turned left into a corridor that led to the front of the house. She had a cozy living room with a small, bay window. There were throw pillows on the floor, and brick-and-board bookcases along both walls. Two low tables and some indirect lighting completed the furnishings.

  She laid the towel carefully on one of the tables and asked me if I wanted a drink.

  “Ice water?” I said, feeling the dehydration of the Chinese food and the screwdrivers.

  “I have stronger,” she said.

  “Thanks, just water.”

  She lowered WCOZ just a bit on the stereo under a shelf of mystery paperbacks. “Let me take your coat,” she said.

  I shrugged out of it, and she left with it for the kitchen. Her bottom looked firm in the shorts, her legs straight and slim beneath them.

  She was back in a flash. “One ice water,” she said, handing me a tall, expensive-looking glass. “Pull up a pillow.”

  She collapsed naturally into one near a table with a tumbler of amber liquid on it. I sat down a little less gracefully.

  She scooped up her tumbler and mock-toasted. “Welcome to my parlor.”

  “Said the spider to the fly,” I finished.

 
She smiled and sipped.

  “It’s nice … comfortable,” I said. “Even with the security.”

  She tilted her head in question.

  “Drew,” I said. “On the landing, short for Andrew, as in ‘A. Lynch’?”

  She laughed. “Drew’s a cop. He and his wife live on the second floor. She’s expecting, and he’s just sort of protective. His parents—this is their house—they live on the first floor. Do you want to take your jacket off? The Lynches have to keep the heat up because of her mother. She’s pushing eighty and needs to have it warm.” She ran her nondrink hand down her T-shirt, neck to navel. “That’s why I lounge around like this, even in February.”

  Her nipples were subtly more defined for a moment under the shirt as her hand moved. She took another sip. I downed half my ice water.

  “Under the towel,” I said, “revolver or semi-automatic?”

  Broad smile but sad eyes. “I knew the assistant DA who was shot in his car in Cambridge last year. He was a class ahead of me at New England.” She clenched and unclenched her fist. “But, to answer your question, revolver.”

  I shook my head. “Revolver is a more reliable weapon, but the hammer could get caught in the towel. You should switch to an automatic or change camouflage.”

  This time she shook her head. “It’s a five-shot Smithy Bodyguard. With the shrouded hammer. Drew helped me pick it out.”

  I pictured a revolver with high, thin steel walls enclosing the hammer and a small, scored steel button on top that could be thumbed back but wouldn’t get caught on clothing. Or towels. I finished my ice water.

  “Where are you off to?” she asked.

  I gave her three sentences about Al.

  “Boy,” she said in a low voice after condolences, “this is not how I was hoping our next meeting would go.”

  “The next one after this won’t,” I said.

  She wanted to smile but didn’t. “Are you here about your friend?”

  “No, the Coopers.” I summarized the phone calls, both Marco’s and mine, and my visit to the D’Amicos. I dug out and handed her the envelope containing the tape.

  Nancy swirled her drink but didn’t put the glass to her lips. She laid the envelope carefully on the table next to her. If she wore any make-up, it didn’t show.

  “Joey comes up for sentencing in two weeks,” she said. “Smolina may not be telling the parents, but I’m sure Joey’ll get life. I bet Marco knows it, too.” She sipped now. “Any chance of getting the Coopers out of town for a bit?”

  “I don’t think so. No family they mentioned. Or friends. Or money to do it with either.”

  Nancy sighed. “A year ago, I might have told you I’d see they were watched over. But not after Teresa Alou.” She clenched her fist again. “You remember the case?”

  “Yes.” Tough one to forget after the Globe series. The DA had a squeeze on Alou, a young Hispanic who lived in the South End and knew a lot about the drug trade from her brother. The squeeze was her brother, who wouldn’t talk and would go to a bad prison if he didn’t. Teresa talked for him. To save him. The brother went to a good prison, a farm, a safe one. He lasted three days. First they’d blinded him with some barbed-wire goggles. Then they beat him to death. With rolled up newspapers. It would have taken a long time.

  The DA put Teresa under witness protection in a hotel. Just before the permanent relocation funding was approved by the appropriate bureaucracy, somebody slipped down a rope and into the hotel room. The somebody bashed the female operative and did Teresa. By the time the guys outside in the hall realized the inside operative should have answered their knock, the somebody was gone. Along with Teresa’s eyes, ears, and tongue. He left the rest. Alive, sort of.

  “Sixteen,” Nancy said, bringing me back. “She was sixteen.” She shivered for the second time since I’d come in. Nancy looked up at me. “The Coopers weren’t really part of our case, but I’ll ask McClean. And Drew, too. But I can’t promise.”

  “I know.” I checked my watch. “I better call a cab.”

  She shook her head vigorously and hopped up. “No way. It’d take forever, and I said I’d drive you. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  She disappeared for more like two and a half minutes. She reappeared in an L. L. Bean parka like one I owned, and jeans and eskimo boots. She handed me her business card, home phone written on the back. She walked over to the towel and slipped the gun out from under it and into the parka’s left side pocket.

  “The pocket in my parka’s too shallow for that,” I remarked as she tossed me my coat.

  “Mine was too,” she said. “Mrs. Lynch slit the interior and resewed it deeper.”

  I picked up my bag and we clomped downstairs and into the cold clear night.

  When we arrived at Logan Airport, Nancy gave me a sisterly kiss. I said thanks and entered the terminal just as a cop was waving for her to move along. I checked my bag at the passenger ticket counter and asked directions to the cargo area.

  It took a little explaining, but I used George’s name, and the Delta cargo employee expressed his sympathies and escorted me to the loading platform. His first name was Dario. He was middle-aged and compact. He also looked strong as a bull.

  As we approached the platform, there was a young guy uncertainly maneuvering a forklift and pallet toward a canvas-wrapped, coffin-sized container.

  “Pat. Yo—Pat,” said Dario.

  The forklift operator stopped and turned around.

  “Pat, let me take that one for the gentlemen here.”

  Pat gratefully hopped off, and Dario replaced him. He coaxed and sidled the lift perfectly. Even without the canvas as a buffer, I doubt the casket would have been marred.

  Dario carefully, even solemnly, drove the lift across to a weighing machine. After weighing, he completed a multicarbon form and tore off one copy. He gave me the tearsheet.

  “I don’t think you’ll need this in Pittsburgh, but, just in case.”

  “Thanks, thanks a lot,” I said, folding and pocketing the sheet. “What happens now?”

  “We put the coffin into a covered, locked cargo cart and get it on the plane before the other baggage.”

  I glanced down at my watch.

  “Not to worry,” said Dario. “It’ll make the flight. My personal guarantee.”

  I thanked him, and we shook hands. I went back out and up to the gate for boarding.

  There was no one in the aisle or middle seat in my row on the right side of the plane. The stewardess leaned over and asked me if I wanted a drink. After having had dinner, I thought a fourth screwdriver wouldn’t depress me. I was wrong. I began thinking of happy things I’d be doing the next day, like calling J.T. and watching Martha try to sit shivah.

  We arrived in Pittsburgh at 8:45. I decided to pick up my suitcase later and asked directions to the cargo area. When I got there, a guy in a green worker uniform was standing over Al’s canvas-draped coffin on a heavy-duty conveyor belt. In front of the coffin was a three-foot square box stenciled “U.S. Steel.” Behind it was a wildly shaped package that looked home-wrapped.

  I walked up to the man in uniform. He was fortyish with brown hair and a dead cigar in his mouth. He was just pulling off a pair of work gloves.

  “Help ya?” he said through the cigar.

  “I hope so. I’m with the coffin. I want to see it safely on the hearse.”

  The man shook his head as he removed the second glove and stuffed them in a back pocket. He pulled out the cigar. “You know which home?”

  “You mean funeral home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cribbs and Son.”

  He smiled and replaced the cigar. “You’re lucky. Jake Cribbs is the only guy who’ll come out, day or night. Matter of pride to ’im.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Do you have his number?”

  “I can call him for ya. No charge.” He dropped his smile and nodded toward Al. “Family?”

  I shook my head. “Friend. From the Arm
y.”

  He put the dead cigar in his shirt pocket and wiped his hand. He extended it to shake. “Good a’ you to see him through.” We shook and exchanged names. His was Stasky.

  “I was Navy. Just before Vietnam. You there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Him too?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Stasky pointed to a chair and table with a coffee urn and some mugs in a corner.

  “Make yourself comfortable and have some. I’ll call Cribbs.”

  I abstained from the coffee. Stasky returned shortly. “Old man Cribbs’ll be here in twenny minutes. He’ll give you a lift into town if you need it.”

  “Thanks, but someone’s meeting me.”

  Stasky left me at the table while he tended to the freight.

  Half an hour later, Stasky helped me and Cribbs, a wiry older man in a black stadium coat and commissar’s hat, to maneuver the coffin on the folding high stretcher into the back of the hearse. The air was dry and cold. Stasky said near zero.

  Cribbs said that Mr. Palmer had taken care of scheduling arrangements at the home. I thanked him, and he said he’d see me tomorrow. I watched him enter the driver’s side and pull away.

  I tromped back into the terminal, my exhaled breath remaining a visible cloud about a heartbeat longer than in comparatively balmy Boston. I followed signs for the passenger area and the baggage carousels. The stores along the corridor were the usual collection of coffee shops, shoeshine parlors, silly little bars, and Steeler memorabilia stands. Only the bars were open, the rest locked with chromed gratings in front of them.

  I got to the baggage area. My three-suiter wasn’t on the nearly empty and stationary carousel. I looked around the room. A short, chunky man with a toupee stood up from one of the plastic seats. My suitcase was on the chair next to him. He waved to me, and I walked over to him. He didn’t match Larry’s description of either of them.

  “Mr. Cuddy?” he asked.

  I recognized his voice and extended my hand. “John, please, remember? You’re Dale Palmer?”

  He smiled confirmation and shook.