The staked Goat

hour of internal argument, I picked up the telephone and dialed the Boston police.
    * * *
     
    Two fifteen-inch sphinxes crouch at the head of the staircase in that Boston City Hospital building. Down the stairs is a tomb of sorts, but not the grand, permanent kind their giant cousins guard in Egypt. No Pharaohs here, only transients.
    We went down the stairs. A set of bright-red double doors led to an anteroom. A white-coated clerk behind a desk nodded to my companion, then returned to entering information from a clipboard onto file cards.
    The anteroom was chilly, osmosis from the year- j round frigidity of the next room beyond a second set of double doors. The wall tiles were a sickly, pastel green, the floor easily swabbed, single-sheet linoleum.
    I sat in a molded plastic chair. There was a fluorescent light blinking above me and a young homicide detective blinking across from me. His name was Daley, blue-eyed and sandy-haired. My watch said 11:30 a.m., and the eighteen or so hours he had been away from his bed were taking their toll.
    We were waiting for Lieutenant Robert J. Murphy, who was in charge, to drive in from his home. I j already had asked if I could see the body just for identification purposes, but Daley had said Murphy had left strict orders no one was to see the body without Murphy himself being present. So we waited.
    For distraction’s sake, I tried to remember why Murphy’s name stuck in my mind. It was common enough and I had never met him, yet...
    The swinging double doors boomed open and a heavyset black man blew through them. He had maybe ten years on me, I maybe two inches on him. ”C’mon,” he said to the morgue attendant and the two of us as we rose from our chairs.
    ”Lieutenant Murphy,” said Daley to me as we trailed behind.
    The body room itself was twenty degrees colder and snow-blind white. The walls were honeycombed with eighty or ninety slightly oversized file cabinet fronts. The attendant checked his clipboard, then approached one of the fronts. Shaking his head, he moved to the next and gripped the handle. He yanked down and out, stepping aside as the slab on its casters snicked smoothly outward at chest level.
    I stifled an urge to grab for the drawer before it slid completely out of the wall and spilled its contents at our feet. An unseen brake, however, stopped it abruptly, the whole device vibrating with a soft metallic hum in the otherwise silent room.
    Murphy and the attendant were on one side, Daley and I on the other. It was as though a headwaiter had led us to our table and no one wanted to be the first to sit.
    Murphy spoke. ”Pull the sheet to his knees.” The attendant, with a too-often-practiced flourish, whipped the cover down. My eyes didn’t quite focus, then they did and my head involuntarily jerked up and away. I realized I had been holding my breath, so I exhaled and forced my eyes downward again.
    It was Al. Almost. He had less hair than I remembered, and more stomach, but those weren’t the major changes. Whoeyer had done him had used a cigarette to burn his upper torso. There were burns showing also on his genitals, which had been slashed repeatedly, probably by a straight razor. The burns continued on his throat, lips, ears, and eyes. The eyelids had been burned away almost completely. I looked at his right hand. It seemed untouched. I couldn’t see his left hand from where I was standing.
    ”Recognize him?” grunted Murphy.
    I glanced up at him and came around the slab. ”Yeah,” I said, bumping rudely into him, ”just barely.”
    The attendant backed away and Daley from behind clamped firmly on both my arms. I swung my head around as if to glare at Daley too, but I was mainly interested in Al’s left hand. I caught an unmistakable frame of his left pinky finger. It was bent nearly 90 degrees toward the rest of the hand.
    I looked back at Murphy. He wore a grim smile.
    ”Let’s go,” he said. Murphy wheeled and left the room. Daley released his grip, and we followed. I took an involuntary extra step as the slab slammed shut into the wall behind us. As we walked, I thought very carefully about how to handle Murphy.
    When you decide not to tell the whole truth, it is far better to tell nearly the whole truth. It’s easy to get tripped up in a series of lies, because sooner or later the interrogator will uncover one of them. So if you have something to hide, simply omit it, and otherwise tell the truth. I remembered that from MP