“No,” I said, “well outside the city limits.”
A tide in the Lieutenant seemed to turn. “Cuddy, if you ever—”
“I won’t,” I interrupted, “not ever.”
He rotated the fist with the mug, swirling the coffee.
I anticipated his question. “I had to kill him. Finding out I was still alive, he would have killed me.”
“Or run,” said Murphy. “Man like that, probably had an escape route planned.”
I anticipated him again. “Crowley called it a ‘trap-door,’ with a chunk of money to help him along the way.”
Murphy drank. “What do you suppose would happen to that?”
“Maybe Crowley was decent enough to leave the grubstake to Al Sachs’ widow and child.”
“All of it?” asked Murphy.
“Most of it.”
Murphy shook his head. “Cuddy, if you are for real, I may actually have found something to believe in again.”
I was starting to thank him when he told me to get out of his office. I got.
It was 2:45 p.m. when I walked to West Broadway and used a glassed-in public phone to call Eddie Shuba.
“Shuba,” answered the voice.
“Eddie. John Cuddy.”
A pause at the other end.
“Eddie?”
“That Pontiac all taken care of,” he said, a little strangely. “On its way to glue factory.”
I laughed. “Thanks, Eddie.”
“I did it myself.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Johnnie,” he said, lowering his voice, “I ain’t seen no cops, but that front seat. There was a lot of … like somebody spilled paint on it, you know?”
“Yeah. Somebody had an accident.”
“You O.K.?”
“I’m fine, Eddie. Just fine.”
A sigh of relief. “Anybody asks me, I don’t know nothing.”
“You’re a good friend, Eddie.”
“I old-country man, Johnnie. You no do this without good reason. I know.”
“The best reason, Eddie. For a friend.”
“Take care, you.”
“Take care, Eddie.”
I hung up and decided to call Martha in Pittsburgh, to let her know everything was all right. I still remembered my credit card number, so alternating with directory assistance, I tried her, then Carol. No answer at either home. I obtained Dale’s number and got a pick-up on the third ring.
“Dale Palmer.” There was a disjointed tinkling of piano keys in the background.
“Dale, it’s John Cuddy.”
“Oh, John, it’s good to hear from you. Are you still in Washington?”
“No, no, I’m home now. How’s Martha doing?”
“Amazingly, really. She’s out at a job interview now, and I’m minding Al, Junior.” He paused and the disjointed music sounded briefly louder. “Can you hear him at the piano?”
“Yeah, a budding Chopin.”
Dale laughed.
I said, “How are you doing?”
“Pretty well, considering. Larry is—has moved out.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. I’ve just got to practice saying it. Better now, though, than after a year of unhappiness. I’ve been that route before. The lame excuses, the dark suspicions, the emotional scenes. Better a clean break.”
“I wish I were there to drink to it with you.”
“Actually, I’ve … I’m going to make a clean break there, too, if I can. I was beginning to get a little worried about …it. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah. After Beth—my wife—died, I came close to … it.”
Dale paused, I thought, to move off a subject I hadn’t handled well with him in the past. “John, Carol told me—I know you told her not to, but I’m the only one who’s really home, around here, that is, to keep an eye out—she told me about your, ah, qualms. Is everything really all right? For Martha, I mean?”
“Everything’s fine. No danger. And with luck, a payment is coming through soon that, well, she can use to …”
“Square things?”
“Yes.”
“Bless you, John. She should be home tonight. Do you still have her number so you can tell her personally?”
I said yes. We exchanged closings and rang off.
I used the last of my phone “credit” to try Nancy at the DA’s office. Her secretary recognized my name and told me Nancy had gone home early. I thanked her and hung up.
Leaving the booth, I hailed a cab.
“Where to, pal?”
“East Fourth Street.”
“Here in Southie? Christ, man, you could walk—”
“Twenty bucks, flat rate.”
A shrug. “Your money.”
Twenty-Six
I RANG HER BUZZER once, waited, then rang it again. The cabbie had been compensated enough not to honk while he waited. I heard her steps on the stairs. The door swung open. Nancy Meagher was still in her work suit, carrying the towel at her side.
“I’m unarmed,” I said, glancing down at my sling.
She frowned. “Not funny. Come on up anyway.” She turned. I gestured to the taxi and followed her up the stairs.
To make conversation, I said, “How come you’re still in your lawyer clothes?”
“In this case, they’re funeral clothes. We buried Emily and Jesse Cooper this afternoon.”
Shit. Where was my mind? I’d never even asked her about them.
“Why didn’t you tell me it was today?” I said, an unwarranted whine creeping into my voice.
Nancy turned, looked at me with a poker face. “I figured you had other things on your agenda.”
She turned away and opened the door for us.
“Drink?” she asked as we entered the kitchen.
“Thanks. Screwdriver, light on the vodka.”
I went into the living room. The arm was starting to throb, the last painkiller from the hospital wearing off. I dug out a vial of pills the nurse had given me. I thumbed it open with my left hand and rolled one out into my right palm. Nancy appeared with our drinks.
“Controlled substance?” she asked, but she wasn’t in a mood to joke, and it didn’t sound quite right.
I took the pill from my right palm, tossed it into my mouth, and choked a little on the booze with which I chased it.
“Are you all right?”
I nodded as I coughed. “Just awk … ward with the … left hand. I usually …”
Nancy kneeled down and put her hand on my knee. She waited out my coughing.
“Awkward is about how I feel right now, too.”
I started to talk but she wagged her head and drove on quietly.
“You did something yesterday. I’m sure the Globe screwed up the details, but I have a pretty good idea what happened. I thought about going to the hospital, but I had one dealing with Chief Kyle in the past, and … So anyway, I called the hospital instead, and a nurse assured me you were doing fine. I stayed away from Murphy because I was afraid he’d figure it out.”
“He did, but … well, it’s not O.K. with him, but he understands.”
Nancy’s eyes welled up with tears but she kept them from her voice. “He ‘understands’! I wish I could, but I … I can’t. Not really. I see the vendetta stuff all the time, John, from cafeteria brawls in schools that end up in knifings to the big boys, the no-hands and no-teeth level. What scares me is that it changes the people in ways they can’t change back. It hardens them, John. It also never ends. There’s always—”
I put my fingers on her lips. “This one’s over, Nancy. Finished. The guy was basically a loner. A psycho. No family, probably not even a friend.”
She shook her head and my fingers away. “You can’t ever be sure and even then … oh, shit! I pictured this like a logical jury opening and it’s coming out all wrong, all tangled up.” She sniffled and resumed. “Even if you’re right, there’s still the … the …”
“The fact
that I set someone up to be killed.”
“Yes.”
“And then killed him?”
Nancy lowered her face to my knee and cried noiselessly, dipping her head haltingly.
I stroked her hair very lightly with my fingernails and spoke very softly. “I don’t like having to say this, but please listen. The man I killed was scum. He murdered a string of people before Al, and he tortured and mutilated him first. He left a unemployed woman in Pittsburgh with a three-year-old and a hopeless mortgage situation. And he was smart enough and quick enough to kill me or blow the country before our revered legal system could have begun to make him pay, in dollars or anything else, for what he did.”
Nancy looked up at me. “But you’re not …”
“God, or a judge, or authorized by anybody to square accounts. Absolutely right. But Al was my friend, and the man I killed had wronged him. Do you see?”
She gnawed her lip. “I know what your words mean, but …”
“But what?”
“But I don’t see how this is different from Marco D’Amico killing the Coopers. They helped you get his brother, so he gets them. The man you shot, what was his name?”
“Crowley.”
“... Crowley gets your friend, so you get him.”
I thought back a lot of years. “Sounds like a good law school point, Nancy.”
“So?”
“So law school is law school, and the real world is different.”
“I’m not in law school anymore, John. I’m in the real world, every day.”
“That’s a start,” I said, feeling the painkiller lift and blur me a little.
Nancy rubbed at her eyes like a seven-year-old in need of a nap. She dropped the debate and put on a smile. A real smile, full of warmth and hope and …
I said, “If you’re not too beat, I’d like you to take a walk with me.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Sure. But why?” she asked.
“There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
“I’ll get my coat.” Nancy stood and turned away from me. Back over her shoulder, she said, “You’re a good man, John Cuddy.”
“No, but I used to be.”
Nancy Meagher stopped at the doorway but did not turn to face me. “Sometimes that’s enough,” she said.
I went to the bathroom while she bundled up. The walk would probably dispel the dull buzz I was experiencing from the painkiller, but I had fourteen more of them.
When we hit the sidewalk, Nancy locked her right arm into the crook of my left. The early evening was clear and bright, a little damper but a lot warmer than Pittsburgh. The last few working people were pulling into their virtually reserved parking places in front of their three-deckers. Here and there, one waved to her. She waved back with a name and a greeting.
“You grew up in this neighborhood?” I asked.
Nancy gestured behind her toward the massive Edison plant, puffing impossibly high and full clouds from numberless stacks and vent holes. “Two streets over. Dad died when I was three, Mom dying my last year in law school.” Nancy shook her head. “We rented, you see, and she worked so hard to put me through. Oh, I had scholarships and loans, and part-time jobs, but it was her effort really, and she never got to see it.”
“Oh,” I said, “I think she saw it.” I took a deep breath. “I know I have.”
Nancy pressed her forehead into my good shoulder for a few steps. Then we walked up the hill. We got to and walked through the gate. Nancy never broke stride or hesitated in any way.
“They’re pretty good about leaving the place accessible,” I said.
Nancy nodded, patted my forearm.
“Usually either this gate or the K Street one is open.” We climbed the car path for the forty yards or so to the second walkway that cut right. Except for an engine that I heard pulling onto the wide path behind us, the place was empty.
We walked the right path, then eased left. We stopped a few steps later at the familiar marble stone. Nancy slid her arm out from mine.
“Beth,” I said, “this is Nancy.”
Nancy didn’t say anything. She didn’t look at the stone or at me. She just stared down at the ground, where I used to look. Where Beth was.
I said nothing. Nancy glanced up at the inscription, then down again.
“Thirty was too young, Beth,” she said. “Way too—”
The first shot hit Nancy high on the left shoulder, spinning her around and down. She bounced off the marker of Edward T. Daugherty, d. 1979. I dropped and felt the stitches tear out of my right arm. Not much pain, just the parting sensation and a feeling of warmth flowing outward. My blood.
I skittered crablike in an arc five or six headstones wide. The second shot took a chunk from an angel’s granite wing, and I quick-crawled three or four more monuments away, leading the shooter away from Nancy.
He spoke to me. “I wanted her first, shithead. I wanted her down so I could come after you.”
I recognized the voice, and I rubbed some snow on my face. It stung away whatever painkiller effect the adrenaline was missing.
“Just like you hunted my brother, shithead.”
I moved three headstones more, quartering toward the gate and farther away from Nancy.
“Your brother was the shithead, Marco,” I yelled and dived, a round pinging off my former cover.
“Keep talking, big man,” said D’Amico, sounding closer. “I torched that nigger and his whore. And I thought I got you, too.”
The bomb rigged at my former apartment house.
I zigzagged twelve paces. “I’ve got nine lives, Marco,” I said, diving again as he fired twice at my voice.
I heard D’Amico clicking new bullets against a cylinder, so I moved as fast and as far as I could. Still toward the gate. His next round sprayed stone shards into the left side of my face.
“Closer that time, wasn’t I, asshole?” he called. “I read about you in the paper, but I missed you at the hospital.”
I rolled three or four yards, came up in a crouch. I still hadn’t spotted him, but his voice was moving with me.
“Since when do chickenshits like you read, Marco?”
I slipped on a patch of ice and his next shot caught me in the left calf. I clamped down hard and swallowed a scream. I dragged myself on elbows as fast as I could. If D’Amico saw the blood, he’d have a perfect trail and pick up his pace.
“So, no piece, huh, asshole?” said Marco, sounding a lot closer than I wanted to place him. “That’s how I found you, you know. I told the woman at the hospital office I was your partner and was bringing you your gun. Hah. The stupid clit told me you was meeting your wife. I thanked her real nice.”
I tried my left leg. Gingerly. It wouldn’t push me at all. I shifted over to my right leg and raised up to a three-point stance. I could hold it only for two counts. I sagged back down into the snow.
“You know,” said D’Amico, maybe twenty feet away, “I checked around on you. After the trial. I found out you went to Pittsburgh. I also heard in a bar down the street that your wife was dead and buried here and that you was queer for her.” His voice was circling me. “After what the hospital broad said, I froze my ass for hours out in the car, by the gate back there. I knew you’d come.”
D’Amico stopped talking, he was where he should have seen—
“Blood? Oh, did I get you, asshole? Or still bleeding from last night? Either way, don’t matter. It’s like Hansel and what’s her face, followin’ the bread crumbs.”
A giant 747, on its declining approach to Logan, passed in majestic thunder three hundred feet above our heads. It drowned out everything. I edged around the headstone I’d picked, keeping it between D’Amico’s last position and me.
The plane roar subsided. I didn’t hear anything. Couldn’t hear anything but my own heart, pounding in my ears and pumping life out the holes in my arm and leg.
“Behind you, asshole,” he said from four fe
et away.
I stayed rabbit still.
“From where I stand, I can see a hole in your left leg, just below the knee.”
I exhaled.
“Come on, shithead, turn around. I wanna see your eyes when I do you.”
“Marco—” I said.
“Turn around!”
I turned but my right arm gave way, so I flopped over, like a fish struggling for air on top of a frozen pond.
He was standing, looking down at me, long-barreled revolver in his right hand and pointed at me.
“Oh, this is good, asshole, this is very fuckin’ good.”
“When I had your brother like this,” I said, weakly as I could, “I stepped on his shoulder, on his wound, Marco, ’til he did what I wanted.”
D’Amico’s expression screwed up in rage. He took a step toward me, then stopped. His face relaxed. Sort of.
“Nice try, shithead. You had me going there for a minute. Joey told me about what you did. He told me, all right. But I’m just gonna chip away at you, a part at a time, ’til I only got one bullet left. Then I’m gonna drill you. Dead square in the face,” D’Amico jeered, cocking his revolver. “In your face.”
The barrel mouth slid toward my good leg. I was out of ideas. I thought of Nancy and Beth, Martha and Al, Junior. Of unclaimed book envelopes gathering dust in a post office. The waste of it all.
I heard a shot and a second, and a slug thumped the ground next to me as a third and a fourth and …
D’Amico pitched toward me, the monument between us throwing a stationary hip-check on him. There was a clicking noise behind him as he slumped and tumbled over the stone. His face crunched into a small marker at my feet. There were two gaping, burbling holes in his back. I released a long breath and rose unsteadily to face the clicking.
Nancy was propped against a waist-level cross. A bloodstain the size of a baseball cap was spreading on her shoulder. Her clothes looked like she’d been the mold for a snow-woman. Her eyes were open, but her trigger finger kept driving home the shrouded hammer of the now-empty Bodyguard, methodically, reflexively.
I limped over to her. I put my hand on her gun arm. Nancy stopped pulling the trigger. I gently pried the weapon from her clamped fingers. A police car, lights flashing, no siren, came barreling into the cemetery and up the car path. “Oh, my God,” Nancy said, sinking down on her knees, “oh, my God …”
The Staked Goat Page 24
