The Staked Goat - Jeremiah Healy

by Jeremiah Healy

  Till I got to West Suburban. There he was. Belker, C. Bus. 73 Main Street, Weston Hills Res. 149 Willow Drive, Weston Hills

  I pictured him in that swank suburb. Tall, gawky, Alabama. Obnoxious. And a murderer.

  Bingo. If he lived in Weston Hills, he was no pauper. Martha and Al Junior had won. Now I just had to collect their prize money.

  TWENTY-TWO

  -•-

  I REACHED INTO MY POCKET FOR THE LEFT OVER CHANGE from Arnie's stake to me. I fed a dime, dialed Belker's business line, and was told by an atonal voice to deposit another forty-five. I barely made it.

  "Weston Hills Realty, may I help you?" A nicely modulated voice.

  "Yes," I said, "may I speak to Mr. Belker, please?"

  "Certainly, sir. May I say who is calling?"

  "Certain1y," I replied, "it's—" I scratched my last coin against the mouthpiece and clicked down the cradle in the middle of her second, concerned, "Hello?"

  I beat it to the car and drove to Weston Hills as moderately as a man without a license should. I wanted a look at Belker before I spoke with him. After everything else that had happened, I wanted to be sure it was him so I wouldn't scare the daylights out of some innocent citizen.

  I passed slowly by 73 Main, a two-story, brick-front building, newish and typically suburban. WESTON HILLS REALTY was painted on the windows, and an apparently classy woman was seated at what seemed a reception desk. I parked a half-block past the building and adjusted the passenger outside mirror to focus on the front door of the building. A real estate broker should walk out and around often enough so I wouldn't be there all day. The clock outside the bank said it was nearly 12:30. Lunchtime. I hoped Belker was hungry, because a good cop or nervous operative would spot me after about fifteen minutes.

  Of course, Belker had no reason to be nervous anymore, now that I was dead. Also, he never was a good cop.

  A little voice in my head whispered, "But he was good enough to take Al."

  "Al was away from it and out of shape," I replied. "He was in good enough shape to bounce two Steeler fans around a sidewalk a few months ago," said the little voice. "And he would have been on his guard."

  My response to the little voice's troubling logic was thrown offtrack by the short, red-headed, and bespectacled man who exited the realty door. He smiled and waved to someone. The someone said, "Hi, Mr. Belker." He said "Hi" back and walked away from

  me.

  Mr. Belker. Shit. Five-foot-six and red hair was not the Clay Belker that I knew. But the coincidence. Belker's name in the phone book where Al—

  "But there are dozens of names that you wrote down in Washington that appear in hundreds of phone books," said the voice. "Besides, you don't even know that 'C. Belker' stands for 'Clay Belker'. " Neither had Al, of course, unless Al had called the office. Or the residence. But then, so what? Even if it is "C" for Clay, it still isn't the right Clay Belker. The man I'm looking for is well over six feet and big-boned.

  Wait a minute. The man who came to the clerk at Al's hotel. He was described as short. But, still, where's the tie-in? When Al talked to or saw this little guy, Al would have realized he wasn't the right Clay Belker. Besides, what would Al have had to blackmail Belker about? The only time Belker and Al were in the files was . . .

  The little man was back in mirror-view again, politely walking around an older woman and saying something to her. He was carrying a take-out bag, and his smile was phony, a real salesman smile. Familiar, somehow, like an older . . .

  Damn! I nearly hit my horn, slamming my hand against the wheel. The little man disappeared into the building.

  So that was it. I could see how Al would have been taken and why he was killed. Had to be killed. And why Ricker wanted information first from me, too. I started up and pulled out. I drove slowly as a plan I'd been mulling over took more definite shape.

  The Button. Not his real name, of course. He was one of the first blacks to arrive (and therefore one of the last to be welcomed) in a predominantly Irish neighborhood in Dorchester, a working-class section of wooden three-deckers and family-owned stores south of Back Bay and the South End. The Button had spent twenty years in the navy and was known to almost every cop, private investigator, and industrial spy in eastern Massachusetts. If he'd located ten years later in a classier part of town, he'd be a consultant, not a parts supplier.

  The Button, you see, is in e-lectronics, accent on the first "e." He sells nothing that is per se illegal, only components that a knowledgeable pair of hands can assemble into just about anything. Occasionally, the Button can be cajoled into giving even a professional a little advice. He also has a brother who runs a gunshop in predominantly black Roxbury down the road. While the brother is competent, however, the Button is a genius.

  I pushed open the door, and the wind chimes attached to it tinkled and sang. A few steps later, the Button appeared through a dark red curtain across a doorway behind his main counter. The chimes were a little masquerade the Button played for the test of the world. Behind his drapes was the control board of a sensor and closed—circuit TV system that had picked me up as soon as I left my car half a block away. The Button nevertheless feigned surprise and delight at seeing me. Perhaps he had forgotten he once had shown me the control board. Or maybe somebody finally had ripped it off.

  "Why, John Francis. It is so good to see you." His face was deep coal in color and cracked with his wide smile. A fringe of short-cropped white hair rode up in front of his ears, then slid down as he dropped the smile. "I just realized I haven't laid eyes on you since your wife's passing."

  "I got your card. It was good of you to think of me, and poor form for me not to acknowledge it."

  The Button smiled again, more mellow than bright. He dismissed my confession, like an admiral forgiving an aide's blunder. "Please, no apologies are necessary. Perhaps, though, an explanation?" The Button put an index finger to his chin, creasing and raising his eyes thoughtfully. "I could have sworn I read something quite disquieting about you in the Globe this morning."

  I shrugged. "Surely you don't believe all that you read."

  The Button dropped his hands and fussed with the arrangement of a few small gizmos on the countertop. "No, but it is good to see that Mark Twain's response is applicable to an old and valued customer as well."

  I smiled at the "Reports of my death . . ." allusion and began to explain what I wanted. He stopped me at one point and brought a clipboard with graph paper out from under the counter. The Button diagramed and labeled a bit as I talked. He was like a secretary taking a visual form of dictation.

  I pointed to one part of the diagram. "I need this to be mountable inside the engine compartment of a car."

  "Hmmmm," went the Button, as he sketched and scribbled a few extra parts specifications on the margin of the diagram.

  "It'll also have to be simple enough to be set up

  entirely by me."

  "Hmmmm," said the Button, "that simple, eh."

  "Uh-huh."

  He scratched out a few connecting lines on the diagram and drew some more direct ones.

  "Lastly," I said, "I need a special kind of triggering mechanism."

  "What kind?" he said.

  "I want a trigger that will activate when I release it, not when I depress it."

  The Button frowned. "When you release it?"

  "That's right."

  The Button doodled a bit on the diagram and looked up. "Like what they use on a subway train?"

  "Subway train?"

  "Yes. They call it a dead-man's switch."

  I exhaled a bit longer than usual. "Exactly," I said.

  The Button crossed to the door, swung the gone-to-lunch side of the sign outward and pushed a red plastic square at the baseboard. He came back and beckoned me through the curtain. There he assembled and demonstrated each component, including the two-step arming of the switch. When he was satisfied I was familiar with the system, he slipped it into a brown shopping bag along with fou
r mounting braces of varying angles and metal screws of varying diameters. I pulled out some money, and he asked if that was it.

  "Almost," I replied. "Now I'd like to call your brother."

  The Button wagged his head. He didn't even look surprised.

  * * *

  An auto graveyard is a busy place during a New England winter. The average car-owner now keeps a car something like seven and a half years. That's a lot of road salt, sand, and skids to work on a car. Toss in drunk middle-aged drivers and inexperienced teenage drag-racers, and you have a junkyard's bonanza.

  I followed two late-model Japanese cars being towed inside Eddie Shuba's gate. Eddie was from Lithuania, and in 1945 he was seventeen years old. That was when Eddie and thousands of other refugees were sandwiched between the Red Army pushing west across Germany and the American forces pushing east. By some miracle, he'd had a little English and got enlisted in our army. He received citizenship, served in Korea, and qualified for a disability pension which he parlayed into the auto yard.

  "Johnnie, Johnnie, good! Very good to see you now!"

  He came humping over to me, his war leg inflexible in the cold. He wore a brand-new olive-drab field jacket with a U.S. flag stitched carefully where a unit patch should be. The driver of one of the tow trucks honked to get his attention, but Eddie ignored him.

  "How are you, Eddie?" I said, shaking the hand that pumped mine.

  "Oh, good, good. Stiffer in the leg and older is a1l."

  He had a crew cut more gray than white and a few facial scars, but still a grip like one of his mechanical car-crushers, screeching and grinding off to the right.

  "So how are you?" he said, openfaced and smiling.

  I smiled back. No need to worry about Eddie reading "disquieting" news in the papers. "I'm fine, Eddie, but I need a favor."

  "A favor? For you, anyt'ing. You t'ink I forget? My arm, my business, what you need?"

  About seven years ago, some high-level car strippers were using Eddie's yard, through a dishonest foreman, to shelter some of their skeletons. My old employer, Empire Insurance, was underwriting a lot of theft and vandalism policies then, and an overly eager assistant DA tried to connect Eddie to the ring. Eddie was clean, but he also knew that I was the one who steered the assistant straight with some help from a Holy Cross classmate who was one of the assistant's superiors. The only time I ever saw Eddie in tears was when he became convinced that his foreman had betrayed him by fronting for the ring.

  "Just a small—" I said, when I was cut off by the tow truck driver, who shoved me aside and started to beef to Eddie. The driver was maybe thirty, at 220 about thirty pounds overweight. He came complete with a freely running nose and body odor, even in the cold, like a month-dead moose.

  Eddie just swung his wrecking ball of a left fist fast, hard, and upward into the driver's stomach. The driver went down on his knees, gagging, and Eddie cuffed him alongside the head with the heel of the same hand, toppling him over into the slush and mud.

  "Swine!" bellowed Eddie. "You wait until Eddie Shuba ready for you. Now, get your rig and get out. Forever, move!" Eddie kicked him rather gently for punctuation, glared at the other driver, who was obviously in no mood for the same, and then gave me a forward march gesture with his right arm.

  "Come, Johnnie, we go into my office. Where there is peace and men can talk."

  I followed him into the shack. The driver's dry heaves weren't quite drowned out by the compressors that seemed never to stop.

  Eddie closed the door behind us, which shut out most of the noise. He offered me vodka.

  "Only if I can sip it," I said.

  He roared laughter and an epithet about how I had to learn to drink vodka properly. He poured us each about two ounces of 100 proof into styrofoam cups. He handed me mine, we toasted the U.S. of A., and then he threw his drink off in one gulp, smacking his lips without a hint of coughing.

  I took a polite slug. He seated himself in a big worn leather office chair, using both hands to position his bad leg at a more comfortable angle.

  "So, Johnnie, how can Eddie Shuba help you?"

  I prefaced my request with an abstract explanation of how I was helping the widow of a war buddy and was dealing with a very bad man. Eddie nodded gravely.

  "So basically I need an old car that'll drive maybe thirty miles competently at highway speed. I'll also need a key to your front gate."

  "Sure t'ing. I got a four-door Chevy Nova that run."

  I shook my head. "No, I need a bigger car, preferably a two-door, with a long engine compartment."

  Eddie poured and tossed another shot, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "I got maybe two cars so. One a Pontiac, '67. The other a Buick, '69. The Buick run better maybe, but it's four doors. The Pontiac got only two."

  “Make it the Pontiac then."

  Eddie looked grieved when I pulled out my bank-roll. "No, no," he said, "favor to good friend. Eddie-"

  I held up my hand. "I insist," I said, counting out three hundred. "By the way," I asked, "do the cops in this town come by here much at night?"

  Eddie, rummaging around through some dog-eared, stained paperwork, gave his lion's laugh again.

  "Hoo, sure, Johnnie, sure. Just like they go to church. Ever' Christmas and Easter."

  He gave me a registration and a set of car keys, then tossed a gate key on top. "Come, we try this beauty for you."

  "Oh, Eddie," I said. "Two more things."

  "Yeah?" he said, turning at the door as I finished my vodka.

  "We're going to talk some more, but if anybody asks you about today, you tell them I just asked you if I could use the driveway beyond the gate as a meeting site. I never got any old car or any gate keys from you."

  "Okay," he said, a quizzical look on his face.

  "And, Eddie?"

  "Yeah?"

  "After I use it, I want the car crushed."

  "Crushed?" said Eddie.

  "I'll be leaving it here tomorrow night, and I'l1 want it crushed first thing in the morning."

  Eddie Exed me squarely. "I show you where to park it. I work crusher Friday morning myself. First t'ing."

  We went back out into the yard.

  * * *

  After Eddie Shuba, I saw the Button's brother. I barely had time to catch the post office before it closed. I decided to let it and the stationery store go till tomorrow morning. I looped and skipped as much rush-hour traffic as I could, buying an evening Globe from a kid at an intersection just as it hit the street a little after 5 P.M. At the next three traffic lights, I leafed through it. My identification as the corpse was dumped to page six by two flareups in the Middle East, a political corruption case, three tires, and a schoolbus accident. I pulled off into a Seven-Eleven store parking lot and called Lieutenant Murphy.

  He picked up on the third ring.

  "It's Mr. Lazarus," I said.

  "Who?"

  "You know, the Charcoal Kid?"

  "Hold on," he said, bellowing something at someone on his end. I thought I heard a door close.

  "Where have you been, Cuddy?"

  "I've been busy," I said.

  "What have you got?"

  "Nothing definite."

  "Let's hear about the maybes."

  "I'd rather not."

  "Now look, mister," he said, the telephone growing warmer from his voice, "I am out on a limb for you. I have an as yet unidentified—"

  "Misidentified," I interjected.

  He growled but drove on. "Unidentified body in the morgue and I have to either confirm or deny the Globe article."

  "Tell them that no positive identification is possible until my prints come in from Washington."

  "The hands were too burned. I got Daley calling dentists. You know how many--"

  "I haven't been to the dentist since mine died two years ago."

  "That's all right. Boring him is better than chewing his ass for the reporter slip. Now, what have you found out?"

  "Al Sachs
was killed by a guy he'd met in the service. Al had blown the guy's cover somehow."

  "How? What's the guy's name?"

  "I'm not sure of that yet."

  "You're not sure of the name?"

  "No, of how A1 found out."

  "What difference does that make? Do you know who the killer is?"

  "No, not as such."

  Another growl. "What do you mean, 'not as such'?"

  "Look, Lieutenant, I'm at a pay phone, and there are three teenage thugs looking to—"

  "Fuck the thugs. What's his name?"

  "Sorry, Lieutenant, I can't hold—" I jiggled the cradle five times, then held it down. I'd have to be straighter than that with him next time.

  I got back into the rental and drove it to Nancy's house.

  "You know," she said, lazily swirling the wine in her glass, "it's kind of nice coming home to a cooked dinner."

  I had stopped at a small grocery and bought four split chicken breasts and some Shake 'n Bake. I tossed it together, and it was ready just fifteen minutes after she'd come in the door.

  "In my opinion, it's the Green Giant Niblets that set the whole tone of the meal."

  She laughed. We were both half kneeling, half squatting around the low table in her living room, throw pillows under our rumps.

  I sipped some of my wine. She pushed some corn around on her plate.

  "Are you getting close?" Nancy said, eyes down and casual.

  "Close to what?"

  "Close to whoever or whatever you're after?"

  "Yes."

  "Can you tell me about it?"

  "Not ever."

  She nodded. She finished her meal in a subdued, but not sulky, manner. She cleared the dishes while I finished my glass of wine.

  Nancy came back into the room. "How about a walk on the beach?" she said peppily.

  "The beach?"

  "Yeah, Carson's Beach."

  "Nancy, it must be zero with the wind chill."

  "So, you can use some of my sweaters."