The Judas Goat (15 page)

“It’s just that myth about your equipment,” I said.

“Ain’t no myth, man.”

I took $100 Canadian out of my wallet and gave it to Hawk. “Here, buy her a hundred worth of clothes. Whatever she wants. Don’t let her blow it on fancy lingerie though.”

“From what I seen last night she ain’t planning to wear none.”

“Maybe tonight is your turn,” I said.

“Didn’t satisfy her, huh?”

“I didn’t come across,” I said. “I never do on the first date.”

“Admire a man with standards, babe, I surely do. Suze be proud of you.”

“Yeah.”

“That why she so grouchy about you this morning. That why I looking better to her.”

“She’s a sicko, Hawk.”

“Ah ain’t planning to screw her psyche, babe.”

I shrugged. Kathie came down the stairs in the wrinkled white linen. She went with Hawk without looking at me. When they were gone I washed the dishes, put everything away, and then I called Dixon’s man, Jason Carroll, collect.

“I’m in Montreal,” I said. “I have accounted for all the people on Dixon’s list, and I suppose I should come home.”

“Yes,” Carroll said. “Flanders has been sending us reports and clippings. Mr. Dixon is quite satisfied with the first five. If you can verify the last four…”

“We’ll get to that when I’m back in town. What I want to do now is talk to Dixon.”

“About what?”

“I want to keep on for a while. I have the end of something and I want to pull it all the way out of its hole before I quit.”

“You have been paid a good deal of money already, Spenser.”

“That’s why I want to talk with Dixon. You can’t authorize it.”

“Well, I don’t…”

“Call him and tell him I want to talk. Then call me back. Don’t act executive with me. We both know you are a glorified go-for.”

“That’s hardly true, Spenser, but we need not argue about that. I’ll be in touch with Mr. Dixon, and I’ll call you back. What is your number?”

I read him the number off the phone and hung up. Then I sat down in the sparse living room and thought.

If Paul and Zachary were here, and maybe they were, they had tickets for the Olympics. Kathie had no idea which events. But it was pretty likely that they’d show up at the stadium. It was possible they were sport fans, but it was more likely that, sport fans or not, they had a plan to do in something or someone at the Olympics. A lot of African teams were boycotting, but not all. And on their track record they were pretty loose on who they damaged on behalf of the cause. There wasn’t much to be gained by going to the Canadian cops. They were already screwing the security down as tight as they could after the horror show in Munich. If we got to them, all they could do was tell us to stay out of the way. And we didn’t want to stay out of the way. So we’d do this without the cops.

If Paul wanted to make a gesture, the Olympic stadium was the place. It was the center of media attention. It was the place to look for him. To do that we needed tickets. I was figuring that Dixon could do that.

The phone rang. It was Carroll. “Mr. Dixon will see you,” he said.

“Why not a phone call.”

“Mr. Dixon doesn’t do business on the phone. He’ll see you at his home as soon as you can come.”

“Okay. It’s an hour flight. I’ll be there this afternoon sometime. I’ll have to check the flight schedule.”

“Mr. Dixon will be there. Any time. He never goes out and he rarely sleeps.”

“I’ll be there sometime today.”

I hung up, called the airport, booked a flight for after lunch. Called Susan Silverman and got no answer. Hawk came back with Kathie. They had four or five bags. Hawk had a long package done in brown paper.

“Picked up a new shotgun at a sporting goods store,” he said. “After lunch I’ll modify it.”

Kathie went upstairs with the bags.

I said to Hawk, “I’m flying to Boston this afternoon, be back tomorrow morning.”

“Remember me to Suze,” he said.

“If I see her.”

“What do you mean if. What you going for?”

“I gotta talk to Dixon. He doesn’t talk on the phone.”

“You got his bread,” Hawk said. “I guess you don’t have to do what you don’t want.”

“You and Kathie can lurk around down at the stadium. If you can find a scalper you might buy tickets and go in. I figure that’s where Paul’s likely to show.”

“What I want with Kathie?”

“Maybe Zachary will show instead of Paul. Maybe , somebody else she might know. Besides, I don’t like leaving her alone.”

“That ain’t what you said this morning.”

“You know what I mean.”

Hawk grinned. “What you want with Dixon?”

“I need his clout. I need tickets to the stadium. I need his weight if we run what you might call afoul of the law. And I owe him to say what I’m doing. This matters to him. He’s got nothing else that matters.”

“You and Ann Landers, babe. Everybody’s trouble.”

“My strength is as the strength of ten,” I said, “because my heart is pure.”

“What you want me to do with Paul or Zachary or whatever, case I should encounter their ass?”

“You should make a citizen’s arrest.”

“And if they resist, seeing as I ain’t hardly a citizen of this country?”

“You’ll do what you do best, Hawk.”

“A man like to be recognized for his work, bawse. Thank you kindly.”

“You keep the car,” I said. “I’ll get a cab to the airport.”

I left my gun in the house. I wasn’t taking any luggage and I didn’t want to thrash around at customs. It was just after two in the afternoon when we swung in over Winthrop and headed in to the runway at Logan Airport, home.

I took a cab straight from the airport to Weston and at three-twenty I was ringing on Hugh Dixon’s doorbell again the same way I had a month before. The same Oriental man answered the door and said, “Mr. Spenser, this way.” Not bad, he’d seen me only once, a month before. Of course I suppose he was expecting me.

Dixon was on his patio, looking at the hills. The cat was there, asleep. It was like when you come back from the war and the front lawn looks just as it did and people are cooking supper and you realize they’ve been doing it all along, while you’ve been gone.

Dixon looked at me and said nothing. “I’ve got your people, Mr. Dixon,” I said.

“I know. Five for sure, I assume your word is good on the others. Carroll is looking into it. You want money for the first five. Carroll will pay you.”

“We’ll settle up later,” I said. “I want to stay on this a little longer.”

“At my expense?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I need some help.”

“Carroll tells me you’ve employed some help. A black man.”

“I need different help than that.”

“What do you want to do? Why do you want to stay on? What help do you need?”

“I got your people for you, but while I was getting them I found out that they were only the leaves of the crabgrass. I know who the root is. I want to dig him up.”

“Did he have a part in the killing?”

“Not yours, no, sir.”

“Then why should I care about him?”

“Because he has had a part in a lot of other killings and because he’ll probably kill somebody else’s family and somebody else’s after that.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to get me tickets to the Olympic games. The track and field events at the stadium. And if I get into a bind I want to be able to say I work for you.”

“Tell me what’s going on. Leave nothing out.”

“Okay, there’s a man named Paul, I don’t know his last name, and possibly a man named Zachary. They run a terrorist organization called Liberty. I think they are in Montreal. I think they are going to do something rash at the Olympic games.”

“Start at the beginning.”

I did. Dixon looked at me steadily, without movement, without interruption, as I told him everything I had done in London and Copenhagen and Amsterdam and Montreal.

When I was through, Dixon pushed a button in the arm of his wheelchair and in a minute the Oriental man appeared. Dixon said, “Lin, bring me five thousand dollars.” The Oriental man nodded and went out.

Dixon said to me, “I’ll pay for this.”

“There’s no need for that,” I said. “I’ll pick up this one. ”

“No,” Dixon shook his head. “I have a great deal of money and no other purpose. I’ll pay for this. If the police present problems I’ll do what I can to remove them. I’ll have no trouble with Olympic tickets, I assume. Give your Montreal address to Lin before you leave. I’ll have the tickets delivered there.”

“I’ll need three for every day.”

“Yes.”

Lin returned with fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. “Give them to Spenser,” Dixon said.

Lin handed them to me. I put them in my wallet. Dixon said, “When this is through, come back here and tell me about it in person. If you die, have the black man do it.”

“I will, sir.”

“I hope you don’t die,” Dixon said.

“Me too,.” I said. “Goodbye.”

Lin showed me out. I asked if he could call me a cab. He said he could. He did. I sat on a bench in the stone-paved foyer while I waited for it to come. When it came, Lin let me out. I got in the cab and said to the driver, “Take me to Smithfield.”

“That’s a pretty good ride, man,” the cabby said. “It’s gonna cost some jack.”

“I got some jack.”

“Okay. We wheeled down the winding drive and out onto the road and headed toward Route 128. Smithfield was about a half-hour drive. The dashboard clock in the cab worked. It was quarter to five. She should be coming home from summer school soon, if she was still in summer school. Oh, Susanna, oh don’t you cry for me, I come from Montreal with… The cabbie said, ”What’d you say, man?“

“I was singing softly to myself,” I said. 

“Oh, I thought you was talking to me. You want to sing to yourself, go ahead.” 

It was out of the way but I had the cabbie take me to Route 1. I stopped at Karl’s Sausage Kitchen for some German delicatessen and then at Donovan’s Package Store for four bottles of Dom Perignon. It almost took care of Dixon’s expense money. The cabbie drove me down from Route 1 to the center of town, through the hot green tunnel of July trees. Lawns were being watered, dogs were being called, bikes were being ridden, cookouts were being done, pools were being splashed, drinks were being had, tennis was being played. Suburbia writ large. There was some kind of barbecue underway on the common around the meeting house. The smoke from the barbecue wagons hung over the folding tables in a light good-smelling haze. There were dogs there and children and a balloon man. I did not hear him whistle far and wee. If he had, it wouldn’t have been for me. There were white lilacs in Susan’s front yard, and the shingles on the little Cape were weathered into a nice silvery gray. I paid the cabbie and gave him a large tip. And he left me standing with my champagne and my homemade cold cuts on Susan’s green lawn in the slow evening. Her little blue Nova was not in the driveway. The guy next door was hosing his grass, letting the water stream out of the pistol spray nozzle in a long easy loop, coiling languidly back and forth across the lawn. A sprinkler would have been much more efficient but nowhere near as much fun. I liked a man who fought off technology. He nodded at me as I went up to Susan’s door. She never locked the house. I went in the front door. The house was quiet and empty. I put the champagne and the stuff from Karl’s in the refrigerator. I went to the bedroom and turned on the air conditioner. It was ten past six by the clock on the kitchen stove. I found some Utica Club cream ale in the refrigerator and opened a can while I unpacked my delicatessen in the kitchen. There was veal loaf and pepper loaf and beer wurst, and Karl’s liverwurst, which you could slice or spread and which made my blood flow a little faster when I thought of it. I had bought two cartons of German potato salad and some pickles and a loaf of Westphalian rye and a jar of Dusseldorf mustard. I got out Susan’s kitchen china and set the table in the kitchen. She had blue-figured kitchen china and it always made me feel like folks to eat off it. I sliced the liverwurst and put the assorted cold cuts on a platter in alternating patterns. I put the rye bread in a bread basket and the pickles in a cut-glass dish and the potato salad in a large blue-patterned bowl that was probably intended for soup. Then I went in the dining room where she kept the company china and stuff and got two champagne glasses I had bought her for her birthday, and put them in the freezer to chill. They had cost $24.50 each. The store had felt that monogramming His and Hers on them would be “kitsch,” I think they said. So they were plain. But they were our glasses and they were for drinking champagne out of on special occasions. Or at least I thought they were. I was always afraid I’d come in some day and find her sprouting an avocado pit in one. Moving about in her familiar kitchen, in her house where it seemed I could smell her perfume faintly, I felt even more strongly the sense of change and strangeness. The cookouts, the watered lawns, the weekday suburban evening coming on had that effect, and the house where she lived and read and did the dishes, where she bathed and slept and watched the Today show, were so real that what I’d been doing seemed unreal. I’d killed two men in a hotel in London earlier this summer. It was hard to remember. The bullet wound had healed. The men were in the ground. And here, this endured, and the man next door, watering his lawn in translucent graceful curves, didn’t know anything at all about it. I opened another can of beer and went into the bathroom and took a shower. I had to move two pairs of her panty hose that were drying on the rod that held the shower curtain. She used Ivory soap. She had some kind of fancy shampoo that came in a jar like cold cream and had a flower smell to it. I used it. Ferdinand the Bull. There were some Puma jogging shoes, blue nylon with a white stripe, that I used sometimes when I was there for a weekend, and a pair of my white duck pants that Suze had washed and ironed and hung in a part of one of her bedroom closets that we’d come to call mine. The part, not the closet. I wore the Pumas without socks, you can do that if your ankles are good, and slipped into the ducks. I was combing my hair in her bedroom mirror when I heard the crunch of tires in her driveway. I peeked out the window. It was her. She’d come in the back door. I hopped on the bed and lay on my left side, facing the door, head propped on my left elbow, one knee drawn seductively up. My left leg fully extended, toes pointing. The bedroom door was ajar. My heart was thumping. Christ, is that corny, I thought. Heart pounding, mouth dry, breath a little short. I took one look at you, that’s all I meant to do. I heard the back door open. The silence. Then the door closed. I felt the apprehension in my solar plexus. I heard her walk through the kitchen to the living room. Then straight to the bedroom door. The air conditioning hummed. Then she was there. In tennis dress, still carrying a racket, her black hair off her face with a wide white band. Her lipstick very bright and her legs tan. The hum of the air conditioner seemed a little louder. Her face was a little flushed from tennis and a faint small gloss of sweat was on her forehead. It was the longest we had been apart since we’d met. I said, “Home from the hills is the hunter.”