I got to Weston Hills about 3:30 p.m. I found a parking space across the street and three doors down from the real estate agency. It struck me that the Pontiac was the oldest, cruddiest car on the street, but I passed that worry and found another pay phone just across from “Belker’s” office.
I dialed the number and got the Mount Holyoke receptionist again.
“Weston Hills Realty, may I help you?”
“Mr. Belker, please.”
“May I say who is calling?”
I had given the answer to that question a lot of malice aforethought. It was luck that he was in, but as much as I wanted to twist the knife in him, I couldn’t let “Belker” and Al’s death, and therefore me, appear connected in any traceable way.
“This is the Board of Registration of Real Estate Brokers and Salesmen. A former customer of your agency has, ah, expressed some concerns to us, and I wanted to speak with Mr. Belker about them before the situation got out of hand.”
“Yes, certainly. Hold on, please.”
Nicely done, Cuddy. Too flustered to remember to ask about your name again. There was an outside possibility that she would monitor the rest of the conversation or that he would tape it, but that was a risk I’d have to run.
A click and then, “Hello, this is Clay Belker.” Another perfectly modulated voice.
“Hi, this is Al Sachs calling.”
Silence from his end.
“Or would you prefer Sergeant Ricker?” I continued.
“Who is this, please?” he said gamely.
“Or maybe a heroin pusher named Bouvier?”
“I’m sorry to disappoint—”
“Listen, I really think we should talk.”
“I don’t know—”
“Today.”
“I’m afraid I’m pretty well jammed-up for—”
“Two hours. In front of your house. I’ll be in a yellow Ford station wagon.”
“I’m afraid that’s—”
“Perfect for you? Excellent. See you then.” I hung up and walked over to an Army/Navy surplus store, keeping my back to his building and watching his door in the store’s reflecting, plate glass window.
The next five minutes must have been bad ones for him. A few notches up from an annoying consumer complaint lodged with the Real Estate Board. I was dead sure he had a stash of contingent money and identification somewhere. Maybe at home, or in a safety deposit box, or with an attorney. Perhaps some fail-safe combination of all three. My gas-guzzling Pontiac was the ace in the hole there: no matter where he ran, the dinosaur’s engine was big enough to catch his car and its body heavy enough to force him off the road.
I had just moved my window-watching from the surplus store to a video shop when my man slipped casually out the front door, an attaché case swinging lightly at his side. He smiled and waved to a couple of people as he made his way up the sidewalk. As he crossed the street to my side, I checked my watch and strolled over to the Pontiac. When he got a block ahead, I started up and slid into the stop-and-go traffic, slowly trailing him.
There have been lectures given and volumes written about methods of following subjects. Two-operative, three-operative, street-zigzag, vehicle-parallel, etc. If you’re alone, you can follow almost anyone for a short time without help. However, you can follow almost no one, even a complete boob, for a long time without a lot of good, and not a speck of bad, luck. I wanted my man to be unaware of me only until he had cleaned out his hidey-hole. After that, I wouldn’t need to follow him anymore.
He weaved leisurely through the sidewalk throngs, still nodding and waving like a candidate on the stump. The flow of traffic cooperated nicely; only once did I nearly pull even with him.
About two and a half blocks down, he turned into a bank’s main doorway. I checked around for police, then eased over into a yellow loading zone. I waited. And worried.
Probability said he was going into the bank to take a huge chunk of cash from a safety deposit box. Possibility said I had caught him just before a scheduled real estate closing at the lender’s, and he was merely intending to collect his six-percent check. Nightmare said he was cleaning out his cache but would smilingly prevail on the security guard to let him out a back entrance.
I sweated for about seven minutes. Then he emerged from the bank. A bit quick for a closing to have concluded, and the attaché case seemed to swing a good deal less lightly at his side.
I put the Pontiac in gear, pulling into the bank driveway just as he was drawing even with the sidewalk.
“Mr. Belker,” I called in an artificial, Southwestern twang. “Yo, Mr. Belker.”
He turned, looked at me impatiently and turned back to continue on his way.
I called a bit louder. “Yo, I do have that name right, don’t I? It is Clay Belker, from Vietnam?”
He froze and looked around. He didn’t think anybody had heard me either time, but he was afraid my next decibel-level might call attention to us.
I expect he decided then and there he’d be having to kill me.
He turned toward me again, smiling and giving his little wave. He walked up to the driver’s side window, unbuttoning his coat and glancing into the empty back seat. He leaned down a little. “I’m sorry,” he said pleasantly, “but I’m afraid you have the better of me.”
I smiled back. I said, softly but in my normal voice, “Get in the car, Sergeant Crowley.”
“I don’t know—”
“If I intended to turn you over to the authorities, I wouldn’t have forewarned you. I’m talking private deal here. Now get in the car.”
“But I have to get some papers back to my—”
“I have a feeling those papers will figure prominently in our negotiations. Now get in.”
The wheels must have been spinning furiously in Crowley’s crew-cut brain. From my viewpoint, there were two alternatives.
One, I was working for the authorities, who had staked me out to lure Crowley in. If so, they were probably within sight and/or sound and could thwart any attempt by him to run. If I were with the authorities, he couldn’t risk reaching into his unbuttoned coat and acing me, since I was probably being filmed, recorded, or at least watched.
The other alternative was that I wasn’t working for the authorities. In that case, there was at least a chance I was alone. If so, Crowley could play along with the blackmail until he could kill me. The “Clay Belker” cover might be potentially too dangerous to resume, but he’d be free and away with the contents of his briefcase.
“Well,” Crowley finally said, “at least you can give me a lift to my office while you explain yourself.” Alternative Two.
“Come around. Front seat,” I said, depressing the switch with my left foot.
“All right.” He walked around to the passenger side and got in, case placed on the floor between his legs. “My office is …”
I shifted to reverse. I backed out and headed down Main Street in the eventual direction of Eddie’s junkyard.
“My office is back the other way,” said Crowley evenly.
“We’re taking the scenic route,” I said and glanced at him. He sat slightly sidesaddle, a Walther PPK in his right hand. He held it low, out of my reach, and angled up at my chest.
“Fine weapon, the Walther,” I observed.
“Take the next right,” Crowley said.
“Of course, without a silencer, kind of noisy.” The next right slid by.
He advanced the weapon an inch or so toward me. “I would take the next available right if I were you.”
I smiled. “Take a look at my left foot.”
Crowley looked down and tensed. “You’re wired. I knew that—”
“It’s a wire, all right, but not to a tape machine. My foot’s depressing an armed switch. The switch is connected to enough explosives in the front of the car to send both of us back to Saigon.”
He didn’t offer any reply.
“Therefore,” I continued, “if you shoot me or don’t coop
erate, I let up on the dead-man’s switch, and we both blow.”
“That’s crazy,” Crowley said, still evenly. “Either way you lose.”
I tried to sound resigned. “I’m a down-and-out private investigator, boy-o. I lost my wife to cancer and my best Army buddy to you. Al Sachs has a widow and infant son that I sure as hell can’t provide for. I don’t see that anybody except you is so much worse off if I lift my foot.”
“You’re bluffing,” he said, still with no emotion in his voice. He must have been a great real estate bargainer. “Nobody is that suicidal.”
I shrugged and ignored the next available right.
“Nobody,” my boy repeated.
We drove on for a bit. Neither of us said anything.
“Where are we going,” he finally said, not quite so evenly as before.
I tried not to sound relieved. “To someplace quiet. Where we can talk about Al’s family. And their future.”
We traveled in silence after that.
I drove past Eddie Shuba’s gate on the right and counted five blocks before turning in. It was 4:35 and already dark.
“I don’t like this,” said Crowley.
“I don’t much care about that,” I replied.
My rental was still across the street. From a windshield appraisal, it didn’t look like anybody had stripped it. I turned left into and behind the abandoned auto body shop.
Crowley’s head whipped nervously left and right. “I hear a sound or see anybody, and you’re dead.”
“Relax,” I said. “There’s just the two of us.” I turned off the engine. It was perfectly, almost serenely, quiet in the derelict neighborhood. “Besides, if I’m dead, so are you.”
I watched Crowley steadily for a minute or two. The car was still warm from the heater, but he was perspiring a little more than the temperature alone would have warranted. He was pale, too, like a grunt from the bush during the rainy season in Vietnam.
His gun hand was steady, though. Quite steady.
“You wanted to talk,” Crowley said. “So talk.”
I shifted carefully to face him a little more directly. He stared at my left stationary foot until I stopped moving.
“I figure that by now you’re convinced I’m not working with the cops, the Army, or anybody.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”.
“O.K.,” I said, “so you’re not convinced. Let me do the talking, then, ’til you get bored. Then feel free to jump in.”
Crowley said nothing, so I continued.
“My guess is that you were up to your eye balls in something, probably black market. Covering for shortage investigations, helping launder the skim, whatever. Anyway, you sensed that somebody was on to the operation, but still a few turns or steps away from you. I figure it was like a chess game, and you could see checkmate in maybe a few moves.”
“I don’t know—”
“So,” I talked over him, “you had to set up a safety valve for yourself. An out. But a big problem. You’re in Saigon, not the states. If you want to get back to The World, you’ve got to get out of the country and then back into this one. Shipping out of ’Nam other than with Uncle Sam’s blessings would be touchy and expensive. Slipping out with Uncle Sam focusing especially on you is touchier and very expensive. So you set up a trap door as your out.”
I paused. Crowley’s jaw worked a few times, but no sound.
“You arrange a meeting between yourself and one Bouvier, a ballsy, reasonably connected holdover from the colonial heydays. But there’s a double-cross, and a bit of explosive takes somebody’s head off. Your double-cross, my friend, but, more’s the pity, not your head. You and Bouvier are roughly the same size and coloring, and with everybody thinking he killed you, attention is shifting from the crooked non-com to the dastardly drug dealer. Of course, you need some help there, but it doesn’t have to be much. Just one man really. The MP who takes the prints off the corpse. No head means no face or dental charts for identification. So you draw Clay Belker into it ahead of time, and after he roll-prints the corpse, he switches fingerprint cards for you. No big problem. The prints on the switched card match the ones of yours on file, and you just lay low for a couple of weeks, then fake enough ID to come out as, what, a British journalist?”
Crowley stared hard at me. “Canadian,” he said.
“Ah, of course, virtually no accent for you to fake. Anyway, you get back to the states, but you realize then, or maybe you realized beforehand, that you’d be short one important item without which you’d be doomed to menial, unpleasant jobs and frequent relocation.”
He swallowed hard.
“You also had a loose end dangling. A potentially dangerous one. The absence of the item and the potential of the loose end would make it tough to enjoy your profits much.”
I gave Crowley my best smile. “The item was a Social Security card. The loose end was Belker. My guess is that you decided to kill both birds with one stone.”
My passenger laughed. It startled me. The noise was like a little creature chirping, then stopping to listen. “You know,” he said, almost nostalgically, “it was a stone I used. I mean, I could have bought a Social Security card, but you never really know whose card you’re buying. Then some computer or compulsive, low-level auditor spots a discrepancy and where are you? Nowhere, except the slammer or back on the run. No, Belker was perfect. I knew about him, you see. I checked his 201 file very carefully. Neither of us had any family. To know Belker was to dislike him, so no friends to worry about coming to look him—or me—up. Just in case, though, I went through everybody’s 201 file who had anything to do with him. That left me with quite a choice, geographically. I decided I liked Boston the best.” Crowley frowned. “How did I miss you?”
“I wasn’t in Saigon then. I arrived a few months later.”
He smiled. “Well, even so, you would have been no danger. I changed my appearance, and—good God—there must be dozens of ‘Clay Belkers’ in this country anyway. If somebody did stumble on the name, I just wasn’t that Clay Belker.”
“To avoid even such a small risk, why didn’t you just change your name? From Clay Belker to something else, I mean?”
“I looked into it, but the process required a birth certificate. I was older than Belker and, well, applying for a driver’s license or broker’s license is one thing, going before a judge is another. Besides, like I said, there didn’t seem to be much downside exposure.”
Crowley was doing an excellent job of lulling me. He came across as a reasonable, thoughtful man. A sweetheart of a guy who had tortured and mutilated a good friend of mine.
“You used a stone?”
He blinked.
“You used a ‘stone,’ you said.”
“Oh, yes. To kill Belker. I arranged for him to meet me in San Francisco when he got rotated back to the states. I told him that I wanted to wait ’til he was discharged, so that he could take off without leaving any tracks that would be followed. He was discharged on a Thursday. Belker had all his gear in a duffel bag and met me in Golden Gate Park. We drove out to a place called Muir Wood. Heard of it?”
“No.”
“It’s a stand, actually I guess nearly a whole valley, of redwood trees only about an hour’s drive from San Francisco. Someone, not Muir, saved the valley from being developed. Nobody ever does anything there except maintain the trails. We hiked about half a mile off one. I hit him with a stone. A few times. Then I used a folding entrenching tool from his duffel bag to bury him. The ground was pretty soft. It didn’t take long.”
“Then?”
“I came to Boston, sent the Army a change-of-address so I could do my income taxes correctly as Clay Belker, and lived happily, conservatively, ever since.”
“Until last week.”
Crowley’s face clouded. “Yes,” he said. “The fool. How can one contemplate that a moron from the Army would go through telephone books looking for … Oh, it’s simply too ridiculous.”
>
“Al tried to call you, thought it was the wrong guy, but—”
“Oh, I handled it badly. My receptionist was out getting coffee. I took the call, and I realized who it was but feigned ignorance. Sachs told me later that he recognized my voice. That was arrogant of him, the Jewboy. I think instead that he just could not believe he was wrong and came to the office to see me. Sachs spotted me getting into my car and followed me to my home. He knocked on my door.” Crowley gestured with the gun. “Can you imagine that? He actually knocked at my door and came in. I told him I would have to gather the money. We arranged the drop-off for the next day. A warehouse area”—he swung his head around slowly—“not unlike this one. Sachs was very nervous. And not too smart, after all.” Crowley sneered at me.
I tried to keep my voice level. “How did you take him?”
“I rigged a bundle with a gas trigger. Not unlike the substance Ricker said he used on you. In any case, the baboon opened the bundle at the drop-off. He keeled over, and I waited ’til he revived and then interrogated him.”
“Were you acquainted with Jacquie’s father, too?”
“Jacquie?”
“Ricker’s wife.”
“No. Outside of ’Nam I barely knew him. Ricker, I mean. Or Mayhew. They were just people in our network. Ricker told me on the telephone that you recognized him from a photo … oh, of course! That’s how you recognized me, too. From the photo in the file.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I recognized you from the photo in Al’s package.”
“Package?” Crowley looked pained. “What package?”
“After Al spotted you, he sent me a package. Photos of you. From Weston Hills. With a little chronology of how he found you by flipping through the telephone book.”
“You’re lying,” Crowley said, back to his “even” tone. “You’re definitely lying. Sachs never had time for that.”
“Sure he did. Al wrapped it up for me. Fourth-class mail. It didn’t arrive until after I left for his funeral. In Pittsburgh.”
“You’re lying. Sachs never mentioned anything about a camera or a package to me.” Again the sneer. “And believe me, he would have, he told me everything else. After what I did to him, the Jewboy begged me to let him tell me.”
The Staked Goat Page 21