The staked Goat

where a friend from college lived.
     
    Cockeysville. Cockeysville, Maryland. A name that stays with you. Arnie had sent a Christmas card from there every year since we graduated. With any luck, he still lived there, commuting to Johns Hopkins where he taught philosophy publicly and railed against the military-industrial establishment privately.
    As I drove toward the town, my mind kept switching around what I knew. From the photo in the file, I was pretty certain which case Al had stumbled on. The problem was, I couldn’t see quite how. From his eavesdropping in the cellar, J.T. knew about the list, but if Jacquie had told me the truth, he wouldn’t find it. Still, he’d be able to reconstruct it, and the photo with the younger Ricker in it should tip him off. Al, however, hadn’t had access to the files, so he must have found the bad guy some other way. Since I didn’t have, or particularly care to have, access to J.T. and the army’s computers anymore, I figured probably there was only one way for me to find Al’s killer. The same way Al had.
    Whatever that was.
    I hit Cockeysville and pulled up to three phone booths before I found one that had a book. I had the book open, shivering in my blanket, before I realized that I didn’t have a dime anyway. The address would do. Amie, or Arnold. Neumeier. The Ds, the Ls, Na, Ne...
    There was something there, something fuzzy, vibrating in there with the headache and being muffled by it. My hands were shaking, and I was too tired to make sense of it.
    I found Arnie’s address. I got back in the car and crisscrossed streets till I hit his. I knocked on his door just as dawn was breaking. After he got over the shock of my being there and my appearance, what little I could tell him confirmed his view of the armed services. He led me in his car to an all-night supermarket eight miles south, where we parked the government car. Then we drove back to his house. Amie fed me and loaned me fifty dollars and some winter clothes. He dropped me off at a bus station over the Delaware line and said ”for chrissake” to stay in touch from now on.
    I took a Trailways Scenic Cruiser to Providence, sleeping most of the way. I changed to the train and got off an hour and five minutes later at South Station in Boston. The cabbie told me it was 4:15 P.M. I thought about playing possum somewhere, but I needed more money and wanted a licensed weapon. I was willing to chance that J.T. or an allied paramilitary force had staked out my apartment.
    They needn’t have bothered.
    The cabbie pulled to a stop and swiveled around with a shrug. ”Hey, Mac. You sure you wanted Number Fifty-eight?”
    I nodded, more at the blackened rubble than at him. My whole building was gone. As in blown up and burned down.
    I had him drive me to Cambridge. I got off in Harvard Square, bought a ”late stocks” edition Globe and had two screwdrivers in the Casablanca, an after-work and academic hang-out for the post-mixer set. I opened the paper. My building, or rather its destruction, made page one.
    The explosion occurred at 10:00 A.M. On the nose. No doubt of it, because the antiques dealer across the street was just setting a mantel clock when the blast shattered his front windows. The resultant fire raged for nearly two hours. The manager of the drycleaner on the street level was badly shaken. All the residential tenants save one were accounted for, miraculously out of the building during working hours. One body, badly burned, was found that seemed to match the missing tenant’s description. Police were ”withholding any names until a positive identification could be made and relatives contacted.” Due to the suspicious nature of the fire, the arson squad and other authorities were investigating. There was a photograph accompanying the story. In the corner of the picture was a hulking black man I’d bet was Murphy.
    The anonymous tenant was, of course, me. The question then became, who was the guy everybody thought was me?
    I had two candidates.
    One was Marco. He’d gotten the Coopers. He’d try to get me. MO in the ballpark with explosion and fire. Marco just got careless with his implements.
    Second choice was old Curl. Maybe doubled back, half in the tank, to rip me off. Maybe thought of something else he should have done. Marco has visited in the meantime, however, and bad timing cashiers old Curl.
    I wasn’t too broken up about either candidate. Whoever it was, however, I wanted to stay