The staked Goat

called me. He must have called every few weeks after that. He also called me after Empire Insurance fired me for refusing to falsify a jewelry claim, after I started to sink into the bottle, and again after I began to pull myself back out with my own private detective business. Then I stopped hearing from him, which I now realized I found surprising.
    Al. He was the oddest guy I knew because you could never figure him out. One day he ran around literally putting tacks on everyone’s chairs. When I asked him why, he said it was something he suddenly remembered he had wanted to do since grade school. Another time, on an R-and-R in Hawaii, he spent fully two and a half hours of our precious time going through a Honolulu telephone directory looking up the names of his CCNY classmates just in case one might have moved six thousand miles southwest. A third time, in Saigon, he broke down crying at the sight of a bunch of street orphans in rags because he said they were posed like a photograph he had seen of the starving Jewish defenders of the Warsaw ghetto.
    But 13 Rue Madeleine. An old World War II movie with Jimmy Cagney. Contrary to popular belief, we did not always get first-run (or even second-run) films in Vietnam. One night Al and I saw it. I remembered Cagney as an American secret agent caught by the Nazis in Europe and tortured for information. They were going to just dump him on the road as though he had been hit by a car or mugged. Cagney has the last laugh, though, because intelligence that he relayed out before his capture results in an Allied bombing raid that destroys the German headquarters in which he is being held.
    After the movie, Al and I were drinking back in his room. Al said to me, ”John-boy, if I’m ever captured by the other side, like Cagney was, and I figure they’re going to fake my death, like an accident, you know, what I’ll do is break my little finger, and then you’ll know I was killed by them.”
    ”Christ, Al,” I replied, ”what other side is going to be interested in a pissy-ass MP lieutenant like you who doesn’t even deal with combat intelligence?”
    Al went on as though he hadn’t heard me. ”Yup, I’ll break my little finger so you’ll know, and then you’ll go after them for me like I’d go after them for you. To square things.”
    ”What the hell are you talking about?”
    ”Evening things up. A repayment for all we’ve been through together. I get them if they get you, you get them if they get me. See?”
    I told him I saw. I changed the subject, and I could not remember it coming up again.
    Till his phone call.
     

Two
     
     
     
    I HAD TO TESTIFY AT THE D ’ A MICO TRIAL THE MORNING that Al called me, so I did my best to push our dinner out of my mind. When Empire fired me, I was quickly blackballed in Boston insurance circles. Then I received some pretty good press from a case I worked on involving a judge and his missing son. Thereafter, a few heads of claims investigation began to call me for special assignments.
    About six months ago, a worried fire and casualty company contacted me. They had been tipped that one of their insureds had hired an arsonist to torch a warehouse containing obsolete merchandise. The only problem was they did not know when. The Boston arson squad is professional but limited in personnel. It simply cannot stake out indefinitely a building where one act of arson might occur, while being crucified by the media for not nailing the perpetrators of twenty definite arsons that have occurred. Accordingly, the company asked me to watch the warehouse from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., the most likely arson period.
    Since the warehouse owner, one Harvey Weeks, obviously could not be let in on the surveillance, I checked through the neighborhood until I found a nice elderly couple whose house backed on an empty lot behind the warehouse. I was frank with them, and they swore that they would not tell anyone why I was there. Their name was Cooper. Jesse was black, Emily was white. They came north from Alabama to escape racist remarks, slashed tires, and occasional beatings. I suppressed a desire to ask if things proved better for them in Boston. They hated violence of any kind, and they agreed to let me use one of their closed-off back bedrooms that faced the warehouse grounds. It wasn’t perfect, but no one observer can watch all four sides of a building except while hovering in a helicopter above it. The Coopers insisted on leaving me food and