The staked Goat

burgundy sweater, and gray tweed sports coat with dark gray slacks.
    At 8:00 I went downstairs and drove to the Midtown Motor Inn. I circled through the packed parking area and left my car on Huntington Avenue. I walked back to the Inn and spotted a college-aged kid in an ill-fitting, uniformlike orange blazer behind the front desk.
    ”Good evening, sir. May I help you?”
    ”Yes. Could you buzz Mr. Sachs’ room and tell him Mr. Cuddy is here?”
    ”Certainly.” I thought the ”certainly” was from a training manual and that the kid would have been more comfortable with ”yeah, sure.” In any case, he flipped through a View-dex card holder and picked up the telephone, dialing four digits. He waited ten seconds, then hung up and dialed again. He shook his head, hung up, and came back to me.
    ”I’m sorry, sir, but he doesn’t answer.”
    I checked my watch. It was 8:20.
    ”Well,” I said, ”I’m a little early. Can I get a drink somewhere?”
    ”Certainly,” again and gesturing, ”Our lounge is right through there. Would you like me to leave a message for Mr. Sachs to join you?”
    ”If I could have a piece of paper.”
    ”Certainly.” He slid a message pad and Bic pen to me. I wrote, ”If I had to wait for you, guess where?” I decided it sounded arch, so I crumpled it and wrote, ”I’m in the bar.” I folded it and gave it to the kid, who stuck it in a slot with 304 under it. I went past a bank of pay phones with swing-up directories and into the lounge.
    It was dark and nearly empty. A pianist was playing gamely in a corner. A fortyish waitress in black mesh tights brought me a screwdriver. Two half-bagged jerks were hitting on a couple of secretaries with adventures centering around the wholesale hardware game in Wichita. Just as I was thinking of buying a newspaper, the barman turned the lights down another notch.
    I was nearly finished with my second drink. My watch said 9:10. The secretaries had split, and the salesmen from Wichita began singing their version of ”I Gotta Be Me.” The piano player looked like he wished he had been born tone-deaf. I drained my glass, paid my check, and walked back to the lobby.
    The same kid was on duty. When he saw me coming, he turned to look at the message box.
    ”I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Sachs hasn’t come back.” I asked the kid to ring Al’s room again. No answer.
    I went to one of the pay phones and called my home number. I took the remote unit for my telephone tape machine from my jacket pocket and waited for my taped outgoing message to start at the other end. When I heard my own voice, I beeped the device once into the speaker of the phone and heard my machine rewind and play back. No messages. I beeped again to reset the machine and hung up.
    I walked back to the kid and asked if he had a newspaper I could borrow. He handed me an evening Globe, which I read cover to cover while seated in an overly upholstered lobby chair. At 10:15,1 got up and returned it to him.
    ”May I have your pad again, please?”
    ”Certainly.”
    I had been composing my message mentally for twenty minutes. ”I trust your deal was big enough to justify crushing the spirit of your dearest friend.” I signed it, ”Your loyal servant, J. F. Cuddy, P.O.,” for ”pissed off.” I wrote ”10:15 p.m.” under that, folded it, and asked the clerk to substitute it for the message in Al’s box.
    The clerk said he was sorry. I left the Midtown, gathered my car, drove home, and hit the sack. I didn’t bother setting the alarm.
     

Four
     
     
     
    I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING WITHOUT A HANGOVER. I T was light outside, and the clock said 9:20. I rolled over, realized I was slept out, and decided to jog the river. I clicked on the all-news radio station to see how many layers of warmth I would need.
    ”...Maxwell canning the winning shot with twelve seconds left in regulation. Over to you, Marcie.”
    ”Thank you, Tom. And repeating this morning’s top stories, President Reagan warns the Soviets that arms limitation now depends on them, and the nude, mutilated body of an unidentified man is found on Beacon Hill.”
    She continued on about staying tuned for Greg Somebody and the weather, but I wasn’t listening anymore. There was a little lump at the back of my throat and a tug in my stomach. No good reason to think the man was Al, despite the proximity of the body. The statistics were far the other way. But Al was Al, and Al always showed.
    Short-circuiting an