The staked Goat

terrific.
    I hung up and called the Suffolk County DA’s office. I asked for Nancy Meagher. A secretary came on and said Nancy was out for the morning. I told her to tell Nancy that Mr. Cuddy had called and would call back later. She thanked me and hung up.
    I propped up some pillows and lay back on them. I thought about calling my ”friend” at the insurance company who was supposed to get a guard to watch over Jesse and Emily. My ribs hurt every time I inhaled and only a little less as I exhaled. I thought about calling the D’Amicos and complimenting them on the depth of their son’s loyalty to his brother. I noticed that my thigh didn’t ache when I was lying down. Instead of those calls, or calling Martha and commiserating, or Carol and misleading, or Straun and cursing, I put on the pay-TV channel and watched Clint Eastwood do to about a hundred guys in sequence what I should have done to my three the night before.
     
    * * *
     
    The taxi left me about two hundred feet from the steps of the building. My thigh spasmed every time my left leg hit the ground, but I knew the more I walked on it, the sooner it would loosen up. My back and rib cage would ache for a few days.
    It was a clear, bright day, somewhere in the high 40s, which was good, since the seams under both arms on my topcoat were split and hence being repaired back at the hotel or some subcontractor thereof. I had junked my pants, so I was wearing the funeral suit. Gingerly, I climbed the stairs.
    I walked into the crowded lobby. Somehow I’m reluctant to use ”museum” to describe a place that has things in it that I remember as current events. The huge Apollo space capsule exhibit was off to the right. A number of airships, from World War I bi-planes to post-Korea jet fighters, were hanging from the ceiling, fifty or sixty feet above my head and suspended in eternal flight. I spotted J.T., in uniform but strolling unmilitarily around the base of the Apollo exhibit while the turistas streamed along a walkway over his head to see into the spacecraft. I edged over to and under Lindbergh’s plane, staring up at it like a little kid in church. Lindbergh was well before my time, and I didn’t mind thinking of his plane being in a museum.
    ”A brave man,” said a familiar voice from behind me.
    ”Who gave a lot to his country,” I replied.
    J.T. stepped even with me.
    ”Sorry about the telephone.”
    ”I assumed you had your reasons.”
    He was frowning. ”I did. And do. How is Al’s family taking it?”
    ”Wife’s O.K., son is too young. Everybody else is dead.”
    I must have sounded pretty despondent, because J.T. didn’t reply right away.
    ”What is it you need?”
    ”Al was killed by somebody who knew what he was doing.”
    ”The paper, uh, implied that—”
    ”Yeah, I know. But his room at the hotel in Boston was tossed professionally, after he was taken and maybe even before he was killed. Also, Al called me to set up dinner after some meeting he was going to have. He’d have had no reason to go looking—”
    ”Hey, John. Take it easy. I wasn’t implying anything. I just meant the paper—”
    ”Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. ”I know, I know. Let’s walk a little.”
    ”I noticed your limp. And your face isn’t exactly yearbook material.”
    ”Last night I had a little brush with Washington’s version of the Welcome Wagon.”
    J.T. smiled. ”Drunk?”
    I smiled back. ”Me, not them.” My cheek hurt a lot when I smiled.
    ”So, how can I help you?”
    ”The way Al was done, I’m convinced it had to be somebody from Vietnam, somebody he was going to blackmail or something. I think he—”
    ”John, that was, what, over thirteen years ago, anyway? Why would Al wait so long...”
    I shook my head again as we walked in the shadow of an incongruously small but nevertheless lifesized DC-3. ”I think it was something that just happened or just suggested itself to him when he hit Boston. He was in desperate financial shape, about to lose his job and probably his house, and I think it was somebody out of the past. I can’t believe that he ran into anybody like that in the steel industry selling widgets, and anyway, I’ve talked to everybody, wife, friends, business associates, not a whiff until he got to Boston.”
    ”So you figure that something or someone he saw or knew in Saigon touches him off thirteen years later to blackmail somebody who kills him?”
    I clicked my tongue off the roof of my mouth. ”I