The Staked Goat - Jeremiah Healy (27 page)

"Murphy here."

Bee, Beg. "Hello, Lieutenant. Just reporting
in." Bek.

"Hold on a second." I heard him yell at
Cross to close the door.

Bel! "Listen, one of my people fouled up. You
better hear about it."

I looked away from the telephone book. "Fouled
up? What do you mean?"

"A reporter was pressing Daley. Remember, the
guy from the morgue?"

"I remember him."

"Well, it was a woman reporter and the damn
fool  sort of confirmed that the corpse in the building was
you."

"So?"

"So you're on page fucking four of the morning
Globe. "

"Photograph?"

"No, just a short three-inch follow-up, ID'ing
you as the dead man. I'm gonna chew his ass good."

"You know, Lieutenant, he may have helped rather
than hurt. I've got no family in the area to be upset, and I should
be through before any friends volunteer to shepherd my remains
through the formalities."

"I can hold that up anyway. Glad it's no trouble
for you." Murphy grunted. "Course, I'm still gonna chew his
ass." .

"I'll call you tonight."

"You got anything?"

"Not yet. I'll still call tonight."

"Sooner if you get something."

"I will."

He rang off.

I went back to the Bels. Beldow, Belgrade, Bell,
dozens of Bells, then Belson, then . . . wait a minute. K before L. I
went back. No Belk's. No Belker. I threw the white pages across the
room.

I went through the Yellow Pages. Nothing. They landed
just to the left of the white pages. Some guest I was.

Guest? Al was a guest in a hotel. Probably just
Boston white and yellow pages in the rooms, but the lobby?

I closed my eyes and could picture a bank of pay
phones I'd used just outside the bar entrance at Al's hotel. With a
library of phone books below them. Al, just killing time, thumbing
through them.

I took Nancy's money and hopped a Summer Street bus
to South Station. I cabbed it from there to my rent-a-car place. Luck
was with me. The guy behind the counter had dealt with me before and
didn't look like he read comic books much less newspapers. A ten
persuaded him that I'd left my wallet in my other coat and that the
license number I gave him was accurate. I got into the late model
Chrysler and drove to the hotel.

The clerk at the desk was the striking blonde the
uniformed Keller had tried to pick up. I dodged her glance
successfully and went to the phone bank out of her field of vision.
Hanging under them were eight or ten phone books in those black,
metallic, swivel looseleafs. I levered up one suburban directory
after another. Nothing.

Till I got to West Suburban. There he was. Belker, C.
Bus. 73 Main Street, Weston Hills Res. 149 Willow Drive, Weston Hills
I pictured him in that swank suburb. Tall, gawky,
Alabama. Obnoxious. And a murderer.

Bingo. If he lived in Weston Hills, he was no pauper.
Martha and Al Junior had won. Now I just had to collect their prize
money.
 

TWENTY-TWO
-•-

I REACHED INTO MY POCKET FOR THE LEFT OVER CHANGE
from Arnie's stake to me. I fed a dime, dialed Belker's business
line, and was told by an atonal voice to deposit another forty-five.
I barely made it.

"Weston Hills Realty, may I help you?" A
nicely modulated voice.

"Yes," I said, "may I speak to Mr.
Belker, please?"

"Certainly, sir. May I say who is calling?"

"Certain1y," I replied, "it's—"
I scratched my last coin against the mouthpiece and clicked down the
cradle in the middle of her second, concerned, "Hello?"

I beat it to the car and drove to Weston Hills as
moderately as a man without a license should. I wanted a look at
Belker before I spoke with him. After everything else that had
happened, I wanted to be sure it was him so I wouldn't scare the
daylights out of some innocent citizen.

I passed slowly by 73 Main, a two-story, brick-front
building, newish and typically suburban. WESTON HILLS REALTY was
painted on the windows, and an apparently classy woman was seated at
what seemed a reception desk. I parked a half-block past the building
and adjusted the passenger outside mirror to focus on the front door
of the building. A real estate broker should walk out and around
often enough so I wouldn't be there all day. The clock outside the
bank said it was nearly 12:30. Lunchtime. I hoped Belker was hungry,
because a good cop or nervous operative would spot me after about
fifteen minutes.

Of course, Belker had no reason to be nervous
anymore, now that I was dead. Also, he never was a good cop.

A little voice in my head whispered, "But he was
good enough to take Al."

"Al was away from it and out of shape," I
replied. "He was in good enough shape to bounce two Steeler fans
around a sidewalk a few months ago," said the little voice. "And
he would have been on his guard."

My response to the little voice's troubling logic was
thrown offtrack by the short, red-headed, and bespectacled man who
exited the realty door. He smiled and waved to someone. The someone
said, "Hi, Mr. Belker." He said "Hi" back and
walked away from
me.

Mr. Belker. Shit. Five-foot-six and red hair was not
the Clay Belker that I knew. But the coincidence. Belker's name in
the phone book where Al—

"But there are dozens of names that you wrote
down in Washington that appear in hundreds of phone books," said
the voice. "Besides, you don't even know that 'C. Belker' stands
for 'Clay Belker'. " Neither had Al, of course, unless Al had
called the office. Or the residence. But then, so what? Even if it is
"C" for Clay, it still isn't the right Clay Belker. The man
I'm looking for is well over six feet and big-boned.

Wait a minute. The man who came to the clerk at Al's
hotel. He was described as short. But, still, where's the tie-in?
When Al talked to or saw this little guy, Al would have realized he
wasn't the right Clay Belker. Besides, what would Al have had to
blackmail Belker about? The only time Belker and Al were in the files
was . . .

The little man was back in mirror-view again,
politely walking around an older woman and saying something to her.
He was carrying a take-out bag, and his smile was phony, a real
salesman smile. Familiar, somehow, like an older . . .

Damn! I nearly hit my horn, slamming my hand against
the wheel. The little man disappeared into the building.

So that was it. I could see how Al would have been
taken and why he was killed. Had to be killed. And why Ricker wanted
information first from me, too. I started up and pulled out. I drove
slowly as a plan I'd been mulling over took more definite shape.

The Button. Not his real name, of course. He was one
of the first blacks to arrive (and therefore one of the last to be
welcomed) in a predominantly Irish neighborhood in Dorchester, a
working-class section of wooden three-deckers and family-owned stores
south of Back Bay and the South End. The Button had spent twenty
years in the navy and was known to almost every cop, private
investigator, and industrial spy in eastern Massachusetts. If he'd
located ten years later in a classier part of town, he'd be a
consultant, not a parts supplier.

The Button, you see, is in e-lectronics, accent on
the first "e." He sells nothing that is per se illegal,
only components that a knowledgeable pair of hands can assemble into
just about anything. Occasionally, the Button can be cajoled into
giving even a professional a little advice. He also has a brother who
runs a gunshop in predominantly black Roxbury down the road. While
the brother is competent, however, the Button is a genius.

I pushed open the door, and the wind chimes attached
to it tinkled and sang. A few steps later, the Button appeared
through a dark red curtain across a doorway behind his main counter.
The chimes were a little masquerade the Button played for the test of
the world. Behind his drapes was the control board of a sensor and
closed—circuit TV system that had picked me up as soon as I left my
car half a block away. The Button nevertheless feigned surprise and
delight at seeing me. Perhaps he had forgotten he once had shown me
the control board. Or maybe somebody finally had ripped it off.

"Why, John Francis. It is so good to see you."
His face was deep coal in color and cracked with his wide smile. A
fringe of short-cropped white hair rode up in front of his ears, then
slid down as he dropped the smile. "I just realized I haven't
laid eyes on you since your wife's passing."

"I got your card. It was good of you to think of
me, and poor form for me not to acknowledge it."

The Button smiled again, more mellow than bright. He
dismissed my confession, like an admiral forgiving an aide's blunder.
"Please, no apologies are necessary. Perhaps, though, an
explanation?" The Button put an index finger to his chin,
creasing and raising his eyes thoughtfully. "I could have sworn
I read something quite disquieting about you in the Globe this
morning."

I shrugged. "Surely you don't believe all that
you read."

The Button dropped his hands and fussed with the
arrangement of a few small gizmos on the countertop. "No, but it
is good to see that Mark Twain's response is applicable to an old and
valued customer as well."

I smiled at the "Reports of my death . . ."
allusion and began to explain what I wanted. He stopped me at one
point and brought a clipboard with graph paper out from under the
counter. The Button diagramed and labeled a bit as I talked. He was
like a secretary taking a visual form of dictation.

I pointed to one part of the diagram. "I need
this to be mountable inside the engine compartment of a car."

"Hmmmm," went the Button, as he sketched
and scribbled a few extra parts specifications on the margin of the
diagram.

"It'll also have to be simple enough to be set
up
entirely by me."

"Hmmmm," said the Button, "that
simple, eh."

"Uh-huh."

He scratched out a few connecting lines on the
diagram and drew some more direct ones.

"Lastly," I said, "I need a special
kind of triggering mechanism."

"What kind?" he said.

"I want a trigger that will activate when I
release it, not when I depress it."

The Button frowned. "When you release it?"

"That's right."

The Button doodled a bit on the diagram and looked
up. "Like what they use on a subway train?"

"Subway train?"
 

"Yes. They call it a dead-man's switch."

I exhaled a bit longer than usual. "Exactly,"
I said.

The Button crossed to the door, swung the
gone-to-lunch side of the sign outward and pushed a red plastic
square at the baseboard. He came back and beckoned me through the
curtain. There he assembled and demonstrated each component,
including the two-step arming of the switch. When he was satisfied I
was familiar with the system, he slipped it into a brown shopping bag
along with four mounting braces of varying angles and metal screws of
varying diameters. I pulled out some money, and he asked if that was
it.

"Almost," I replied. "Now I'd like to
call your brother."

The Button wagged his
head. He didn't even look surprised.

* * *

An auto graveyard is a busy place during a New
England winter. The average car-owner now keeps a car something like
seven and a half years. That's a lot of road salt, sand, and skids to
work on a car. Toss in drunk middle-aged drivers and inexperienced
teenage drag-racers, and you have a junkyard's bonanza.

I followed two late-model Japanese cars being towed
inside Eddie Shuba's gate. Eddie was from Lithuania, and in 1945 he
was seventeen years old. That was when Eddie and thousands of other
refugees were sandwiched between the Red Army pushing west across
Germany and the American forces pushing east. By some miracle, he'd
had a little English and got enlisted in our army. He received
citizenship, served in Korea, and qualified for a disability pension
which he parlayed into the auto yard.

"Johnnie, Johnnie, good! Very good to see you
now!"

He came humping over to me, his war leg inflexible in
the cold. He wore a brand-new olive-drab field jacket with a U.S.
flag stitched carefully where a unit patch should be. The driver of
one of the tow trucks honked to get his attention, but Eddie ignored
him.

"How are you, Eddie?" I said, shaking the
hand that pumped mine.

"Oh, good, good. Stiffer in the leg and older is
a1l."

He had a crew cut more gray than white and a few
facial scars, but still a grip like one of his mechanical
car-crushers, screeching and grinding off to the right.

"So how are you?" he said, openfaced and
smiling.

I smiled back. No need to worry about Eddie reading
"disquieting" news in the papers. "I'm fine, Eddie,
but I need a favor."