The Staked Goat Read online

  No one else came to say good-bye.

  We stopped on the way home and picked up a deli-spread that Dale’d had the foresight to order.

  Ten

  IT HAD BEEN DECIDED, because of the delay with Al’s body in Boston, to have the funeral on Saturday at 1 p.m., after only one day of wake. In view of Friday’s turnout, it looked like a good call.

  I had a quick and simple breakfast with Dale, Larry having gone off on his own somewhere. Dale had a full morning of lessons, but he insisted I borrow his car and gave me detailed directions to Forrester Drive.

  Number One Hundred was as Norm Denver described it objectively, but not subjectively. It was made of red brick, but the brick looked dyed. The columns were too short, and the grounds more lot-like than estate-like. There was a cast-iron lackey in black-face at the ornate lamppost and two Cadillacs, one silver, the other blue, in the driveway. The overall impression was nouveau tacky.

  I parked on the street and caught a chill walking to the house. I pressed the doorbell and got no immediate response. The cold made me press the button again, a little sooner probably than was necessary. The door opened. It was a young man with thinning hair and a narrow nose. He wore black, horn-rimmed glasses with small frames, like the kind the Army would issue you for free. He asked what I wanted. As he spoke, the glasses slid halfway down his nose.

  “I need to speak with your father,” I guessed. “About Al Sachs.”

  The man swallowed and pushed his glasses up with his middle finger. “I’m sorry, but we’re busy on other matters. Please call my office on Monday—”

  I stepped one foot over the threshold before he thought to close the door. “I won’t be here on Monday.”

  “Now look, fella—” he said, glasses slipping again and being righted again.

  An authoritative voice from inside the house yelled, “Buzz, who the hell is it?”

  Buzz. I immediately felt deeply sorry for anyone who looked like this and was nicknamed “Buzz.”

  “It’s a man who wants to talk about Mr. Sachs.”

  “Get rid of him.”

  Buzz looked down at my foot. His glasses slid south a third time. “He won’t leave,” said Buzz for me.

  A disgusted, guttural sound from inside the house. “Well, then, bring him in before you let every fuckin’ degree of heat outta here.”

  Buzz showed me in.

  We turned left into a large living room. There was a fire in the hearth. The furniture was expensive but ill-matched. A man in his late fifties sat on the couch, papers spread on a coffee table in front of him. He had a gray crew-cut, stolid features, and would probably have been stocky if he’d stood to greet me. He didn’t bother.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” he said. Papa Straun wore black horn-rimmed glasses too. They and the last name appeared to be the only things father and son had in common.

  I took one chair and Buzz took another. “My name is John Cuddy. I want to know what Al Sachs has coming to his family.”

  Papa Straun snorted.

  Buzz said, “Are you an attorney, Mr. Cuddy?”

  “No. Al was a friend from the Army.”

  Buzz seemed to fill out a bit, perhaps relieved that he was the only lawyer in the room. “My father and I are in the process of reviewing Mr. Sachs’ file, and we intend to provide Mrs. Sachs with a detailed memo of—”

  “Cut the shit, Buzz,” said Straun. “You an MP, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was Armor. With Patton. Didn’t have to go. They had deferments then for guys in steel. Defense plant priorities, that kind of stuff. But I went anyway.” He gestured toward the papers spread on the table. “Sachs said in his interview that he was an MP. Weren’t many Jews in my outfit.”

  I made no comment.

  “Aren’t a hell of a lot of Jews in Pittsburgh. Some people think I hired Sachs because he was a Jew and could sell. That’s bullshit. I hired him because he was from New York, and we thought we could get some orders back there by usin’ a guy from the city. But he wouldn’t play the game, you know.”

  I made no comment again.

  “Sachs had ideas about how to do things different. So I gave him a chance. But he sucked.” Buzz flinched, and Straun dug out a ledger sheet. “The Jew made his draw three months outta the last twelve. I shoulda sacked him in August.” Straun tossed the sheet in a spinning motion so it ended up on my side of the table. “See for yourself.”

  I didn’t look down at the paper.

  Papa Straun worked his mouth a little without speaking. Buzz was fidgeting. I broke the silence.

  “He left a wife and a child. What do they have coming?”

  “Nothing,” said Straun.

  “You see, Mr. Cuddy,” said Buzz, “Mr. Sachs exercised his option to convert what insurance was provided to cash as a credit against his draw. It’s all here in detail in a draft memo—”

  “Buzz,” snapped Straun, pushing a mug toward him, “get me some more coffee.”

  Buzz looked from me to him then back to me.

  “Mr. Cuddy,” he said, crestfallen, “would you like …”

  I shook my head. Buzz picked up the mug and stepped from the room.

  “You ever read Dr. Spock, Straun?”

  “What?” he said.

  “Skip it. In plain English, where does Al’s family stand?”

  “The kid’s right,” said Straun defensively. “Law school—Harvard Law School, can you imagine? He goes through Harvard and he’s like a rabbit. You couldn’t trust him to run a pony ride and do it right. But he writes a hell of a memo, that boy. He’s dead right about Sachs. The guy gave up every kinda benefit we give to keep covering his draw. He was gettin’ the heave-ho this week.

  “Then he got killed.” Straun’s face changed a little, almost human. “Funny, you know the papers had how he was done in. I never figured him for a queer.”

  I tried to remind myself that guys like me aren’t supposed to hit people older and smaller without physical provocation. “Did Al know he was going to be fired?”

  Straun blinked at me. “Yeah, he knew. I told him two weeks ago. Two weeks ago today. The state says you gotta give ’em two weeks’ notice, so that’s what Sachs got.”

  Buzz came back in, clutching the coffee mug in both hands. His hands trembled and some spilled onto his top fingers. He winced, but kept silent and kept coming.

  “Anything else?” said Straun, taking the mug in his left hand.

  “Yes,” I said. “The funeral’s at one. Today.”

  Straun slurped some coffee. “Don’t wait for us,” he said, motioning Buzz to the paperwork.

  I leaned across the table and grabbed Straun’s left wrist. I thought about twisting it toward me, spilling the coffee onto the papers, but I figured that would only inconvenience Buzz. So I twisted away, toward Straun’s ample lap. He jumped up screaming.

  “What the fuck was that?” he shrieked, grabbing his crotch and jumping from one leg to another.

  “A small gesture,” I said.

  Buzz ran to get some towels and ice while I let myself out.

  When Beth died, Joe Mirelli, a priest and friend, said her funeral mass. I remember him delaying the beginning of the service so that the latecomers could be parked outside and seated inside. I’m sure the elder Cribbs often made the same suggestion. But not that day.

  Martha and Carol, Dale and Larry, and me. The kids were at Carol’s house with her sitter. Cribbs and his son. All told, one man short on pall-bearers.

  We stood in the same room as yesterday. Mr. Cribbs checked his watch at the stroke of one and bade us be seated. After Martha sat down, Cribbs walked over to her, bent at the waist and held her right hand with both of his. He said something, and she nodded. Then he walked, graduation-step, to the slim podium next to Al’s coffin at the front of the room.

  He spoke for perhaps four minutes. Al’s birth, schooling, military service. Meeting Martha, marriage, life in Pittsburgh. No mention of work, me
ans of death, or thinness of crowd. Acknowledged each in the audience by first name, correctly assigning us to one or another part of Al’s or Martha’s life. Then a pause, then a moment of silence. I recalled Beth’s hour-long high mass and eulogy. Religion be damned, tradition be damned, when my time comes, let there be a quiet, sincere, professional like the elder Cribbs. To recount briefly and acknowledge accurately. No incense, no ritual, no organ music.

  Mr. Cribbs asked us to stand. We did so. Martha was seated immediately in front of me. Her shoulders rose and fell a bit more frequently than normal breathing would require, but no sound, no tears.

  Mr. Cribbs gestured toward Al. Larry, Dale, the younger Cribbs, and I positioned ourselves two on a side at the coffin. The younger Cribbs tugged and pushed the stretcherlike contraption upon which the coffin rested, and we wheeled it down the aisle. It was a symbolic journey only, the coffin stopping at the door. We mourners filed out of the room and the home, leaving Al with the professionals for maneuvering the coffin into the hearse.

  We had come from Martha’s house in Carol’s ten-year-old Buick four-door, but a liveried driver awaited us in the driveway. He stood at parade-rest rather than lean against the black Cadillac limousine. We squeezed in, sitting close and salon-style in the facing seats. We pulled away from the funeral home, the hearse sliding behind us, headlights ablaze. Not even Dale attempted conversation for the next fifteen minutes.

  The cemetery had a graveyard’s gateway and ground plan. Given all the hills around Pittsburgh, the terrain was surprisingly, even disappointingly, level. I couldn’t help comparing Beth’s sloping view of Boston harbor to Al’s blind, bleak valley, even though I knew her site was more comfort to me than to her.

  The driver pulled to a stop at a landmark I couldn’t distinguish. He got out and yanked open our door. The comfortable if claustrophobic interior of the limo had insulated us from the winter outside. An icy blade of wind plowed through the salon, giving us the shivers. All exited, we males repeating our superfluous escort of Al’s coffin as we wended between already occupied plots to the open gash he would fill. I wondered what machinery was necessary to dig holes in this weather and how simpler generations managed in the old days.

  Two cemetery employees materialized at the grave. I paid not much attention to the details of what came next. I was watching Martha as we arranged ourselves, buffeted by the wind and cold, on one short end of the grave.

  The ceremony consisted of a neutral reading by Mr. Cribbs and the slow, steady lowering of the coffin by the cemetery staff using strong sashes which were recovered as the coffin reached bottom. The younger Cribbs produced, magician-like, a small bouquet of roses. Beginning with Carol, we each in turn broke a blossom off its stem, bent over the grave and tossed underhand our rose onto the coffin. Martha was last. As she edged to the opening, I edged near her. When she let go her blossom, her eyes rolled back up into her head and her right leg started to slide forward, like a driver’s foot applying brake pressure in slow motion.

  Carol cried out, and Dale and Larry snapped their heads up. I caught Martha at the shoulders just as she unconsciously, and perhaps subconsciously, began her slide down toward Al.

  “She’s still asleep. The boys too.”

  The television showed a boxing match silently progressing. The fighters were lightweights, neither seeing his tenth professional fight yet. But at five-fifteen on a Saturday afternoon in February, beggars couldn’t be choosers. I had turned the sound off during the first round to avoid some local ’caster who modeled himself on Howard Cosell.

  Before she went upstairs to check on Martha and the kids, Carol had been in the kitchen, counting leftovers from last night’s deli spread. Before that, she’d been curled up in one of the two chairs in the room, thumbing through a magazine while I killed three vodka/rocks. Now she took the other end of the couch. Within touching range.

  “That Ruthie is a great babysitter,” she said. “She wears Kenny out. All I have to do is feed him and forget him.”

  She gave me a big smile. I smiled back.

  “And those pills. I’ll have to remember the name of them. They knocked Martha clean out.”

  “You’d need a prescription for them,” I said.

  “Easy enough. I meet a lot of doctors at the club. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, you name it.”

  We had gotten Martha from the cemetery to a local emergency room, where Dale and I cooled our heels in the waiting room for a few hours while Larry and Carol rode back with the elder Cribbs to pick up her car and rejoin us. The doctor, when we finally saw her, prescribed some tranquilizer/sleeping pills, which we filled on the way home. Carol changed at her place while dismissing super-sitter Ruthie, then got Martha and the boys bedded down back at the Sachs’ residence. She was wearing designer jeans that made a little too much of her little too ample rump. She also wore a lamb’s wool V-neck sweater and no apparent breast supporter.

  “Not many private eyes, though.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Not many private detectives at the club. Lawyers and doctors and such, but not many detectives.”

  “Detectives are on police forces, with guaranteed government salaries. Private, tough way to make a living. Most of us don’t.”

  “I’ll bet you’re pretty good at it. Can you tell me about some of your cases?”

  I closed my eyes and leaned my head back. Carol was exhibiting what I call the post-mortem high. When you witness your first few deaths and burials, particularly in your age group, you feel so relieved to be quit of the depressing rituals, not to mention so relieved that you’re still alive, that you adopt a partylike attitude. Gregarious, flirtatious, boisterous. Different people show different attitudes. But they all point in the same direction, toward life and away from death.

  The only problem, I have found, is that after enough deaths, especially close ones, you wait at the departure point long after your fellow mourners have begun moving toward the destination. You remain a wet blanket at the party.

  “Well, can you talk about your cases?” Carol said, trying to fill the clumsy silence I was creating.

  “Not much,” I said. “Professional confidentiality.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said terminally. “Well, I guess I’ll go check on supper again.” She stood up. “What do you want?”

  I suddenly found I couldn’t swallow too easily. Carol really did look a lot like Audrey Hepburn, a little harder in the eyes and softer in the hips, but a lot.

  “John? What do you want?”

  “I want,” I started thickly, then forced a swallow. “I want you to sit next to me, and hug me until I fall asleep.”

  Carol blinked three or four times, then came over and knelt down on the couch next to me. She buried her face in my shoulder and clamped her arms around my neck. We started crying at about the same time, crying with each other and for each other and for all the slights and hurts and tragedies that had piled up since the last time either of us had another to hug.

  Eleven

  I AWAKENED AT 9:30 p.m. Carol wasn’t there but a jackhammer headache was, partly from the straight vodka itself and partly from the dehydration it causes. I ran my tongue over my front teeth. They felt furry. I heard cutlery clatter coming from the kitchen. My stomach growled in reaction. I could feel the death gloom sliding away, eroded by soothing sleep and growing hunger.

  I was stretching and thinking about searching for aspirin when I heard a faint tapping at the front door. I crossed the room and opened it.

  Dale blew in, borne by an arctic blast. “Christ, what a climate,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, pushing back his parka hood, “you get used to it.” He dropped his voice. “How’s Martha doing? We were afraid the telephone might disturb her.”

  “I think she’s fine. I just woke up myself.”

  “John,” said Carol from the kitchen, “who is it?”

  Dale looked from the kitchen to me and cleared his throat. I guessed my hair and clothe
s looked like I had just awakened and, possibly, not alone.

  Carol came out. “Oh, hi, Dale, we’re just about to attack your food again. Join us?”

  Dale relaxed a little. “That would be fine. An old friend of Larry’s from college is in town and they’re out … having dinner.”

  “Terrific,” said Carol, pirouetting and heading back to the kitchen. “Martha and the boys—”

  She was interrupted by a plaintive “Mommieeeee” from upstairs. She was by me like a punt returner and halfway up the steps. “Get started,” she said. “I’ll be right down.”

  Dale laid his parka on a chair, and he and I went into the kitchen. Carol had laid out the now-smaller spread in an appetizing fan around the table.

  “Dale,” I said, “do you have any idea where Martha would keep her aspirin? I got a little drunk after we got home, and I was just recovering from passing out when you knocked.”

  My explanation might have been a bit elaborate for a mere aspirin request, but the dismissing of Carol’s and my shadow relationship seemed to relax Dale even more.

  “Nooo, but”—he dug into the pockets of his pants and came up with a one-dozen tin—“I’m never without these.”

  He popped the tin, and I thanked him for the two I took from it. I had washed them down with tap water, and Dale was halfway through his migraine tales when Carol reappeared in the doorway.

  “Bad news, fellas,” she said, sagging her shoulder into the door-jamb. “Kenny’s sick. Fever and sore throat. The last thing Martha needs now is a sick Al, Junior, so I’m gonna take Kenny home right away.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I’ll stay here tonight and keep an eye on Martha.”

  Carol nodded. “I just looked in on her. She’s dead to the … she’s sound asleep. Little Al, too.”

  Dale insisted on making her a sandwich to take back, and Carol went upstairs to bundle Kenny up. When she came back down, I walked her to the door.

  “Here’s your sandwich,” I said, sliding it into her coat pocket. Kenny was completely concealed in a blanket. “Would you like some help with him?” I said.