The Judas Goat (14 page)

“I don’t know,” I said, “she’s all we have.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said. Her voice was small when she said it. Quite different from the one she’d used when she said she’d kill us when she could. Didn’t mean she’d changed her mind. But it didn’t mean she hadn’t. I figured between us we could keep her from killing us.

“She change sides awful fast,” Hawk said.

“They got changed on her,” I said. “We’ll take her. She may be helpful.”

“She may stick something in us when we ain’t looking too.”

“One of us will always look,” I said. “She knows this Zachary. We don’t. If he’s in on this he might be there. Maybe others. She’s the only thing connected to Paul we have. We’ll keep her.”

Hawk shrugged and drank some wine.

“In the morning we’ll check out and get the first flight we can to Montreal.”

“What about the two stiffs?”

“We’ll ditch them in the morning.”

“Hope they don’t start to stink before then.”

“We can’t ditch them before that. The cops will be all over the place. We’ll never get out of here. What time is it?”

“It’s three-thirty.”

“About nine-thirty in Boston. Too late to call Jason Carroll. I only got his office number anyway. ”

“Who Jason Carroll?”

“Dixon’s lawyer, He’s sort of in charge of this thing. I’ll feel better when I’ve talked with Dixon about our plans.”

“Maybe your wallet feel better too.”

“No, I think this one will be on me. But Dixon’s got a right to know what’s going on.”

“And I got a right to sleep. Who she sleep with?”

“I’ll put a mattress off the floor and she can sleep on the box spring.”

“She look disappointed. I think she had another plan.”

Kathie said, “May I take a bath?”

I said, “Sure.”

I dragged the mattress off the bed closest to the door, and stretched it out across the doorway. Kathie went into the bathroom and closed the door. The lock snicked into place. I could hear the water running in the tub.

Hawk stripped to his shorts and got into bed. He took the shotgun under the covers with him. I lay down on the mattress with my pants still on. I put my gun under the pillow. It made a lump, but not as big a lump as it would make in my body if Kathie got it in the night. The lights were out and just a thin line of light came under the bathroom door. As I lay in the dark I began to smell, only vaguely so far, a smell I’d smelled before. It was the smell of bodies that had been dead too long. It would have been a lot worse without air conditioning. It wouldn’t get better before morning.

Tired as I was, I didn’t sleep until Kathie came out of the bathroom and stepped across me and went to bed on the box spring of the near bed.

In the morning after we checked out, Hawk stole a laundry hamper from a utility closet whose lock I picked. We put the two bodies in the hamper, covered them with dirty linen, put the hamper in an empty elevator and sent the elevator to the top floor. We did all this while keeping a close eye on Kathie, who didn’t show any sign of wanting to bolt. Or kill us. She seemed to want to stay with us as badly as we wanted her. Or I wanted, her. I think Hawk would have dropped her in a canal if he’d been on his own.

We got a bus from the KLM terminal in Museumplein and caught a KLM flight from Schiphol to London at nine-fifty-five, connecting with an Air Canada flight to Montreal at noon. At one-fifteen London time I was sitting on the outside seat with Kathie next to me and Hawk on the window, drinking a Labatt 50 ale and waiting for the meal to be served. Six hours later, early afternoon Montreal time, we set down in Canada, changed money, collected luggage, and by three o’clock we were standing in line at the Olympic housing office in Place Ville Marie waiting to get lodging. By four-fifteen we had gotten to the man at the desk, and by quarter of six we were in a rented Ford heading out Boulevard St. Laurent for an address near Boulevard Henri Bourassa. I felt like I had gone fifteen rounds with Dino the Boxing Rhinoceros. Even Hawk looked a little tired, and Kathie seemed to be asleep in the back seat of the car.

The address was one half of a duplex on a side street a block from Henri Bourassa Boulevard. The name was Boucher. The husband spoke English, the wife and daughter only French. They were going to their summer home on a lake and were picking up two weeks’ worth of rent leasing their home to Olympic visitors. I gave them the voucher from the Olympic housing office. They smiled and showed us where things were. The wife spoke to Kathie in French, showing her the laundry and where the cookware was kept. Kathie looked blank. Hawk answered her in very polite French.

When they had gone and left us the key I said to Hawk, “Where’d you come up with the French?”

“I done some time in the Foreign Legion, babe, when things was sorta mean in Boston. You dig?”

“Hawk, you amaze me. Vietnam?”

“Yeah, and Algeria, all of that.”

“Beau Geste,” I said.

“The lady she think Kathie your wife,” Hawk said. He smiled very wide. “I told her she your daughter and she don’t know much about cooking and things.”

“I told the man we brought you along to stand outside in a jockey suit and hold horses.”

“Ah’m powerful good at sittin‘ on a bale of cotton and singin’ `Old Black Joe‘ too, bawse.”

Kathie sat at the counter in the small kitchen and watched us without understanding.

The house was small and lovingly done. The kitchen was pine-paneled and the cabinets were new. The adjoining dining room had an antique table and on the wall a pair of antlers, obviously home-shot. The living room had little furniture and a worn rug. Everything was clean and careful. In one corner was an old television with the screen outlined in white, giving the illusion of greater screen size. There were three small bedrooms upstairs, and a bath. One of the bedrooms was obviously a room for boys, with twin beds, two bureaus and a host of wildlife pictures and stuffed animals. The bathroom was pink.

It was a house that its owners loved. It made me ill at ease to be here with Hawk and Kathie. We had no business in a house like this.

Hawk went out and bought some beer and wine and cheese and French bread, and we ate and drank in near silence. After supper Kathie went up to one of the small bedrooms, filled with dolls and dust ruffles, and went to bed, with her clothes on. She still wore the white linen dress. It was getting pretty wrinkled but there wasn’t a change of clothes. Hawk and I watched some of the Olympic action on CBC. We were on the wrong side of the mountain to get U.S. stations and thus most of the coverage focused on Canadians, not many of whom were in medal contention.

We finished up the beer and wine and went to bed before eleven o’clock, exhausted from traveling and silent and out of place in the quiet suburb among artifacts of family.

I slept in the boys’ room, Hawk in the master bedroom. There were early bird sounds but the room was still dark when I woke up and saw Kathie standing at the foot of the bed. The door was closed behind her. She turned the light on. Her breath in the silence was short and heavy. She wore no clothes. She was the kind of woman who should take her clothes off when she can. She looked best without them; the proportions were better than they looked dressed. She did not seem to be carrying a concealed weapon. I was naked and on top of the covers in the warm summer. It embarrassed me. I slid under the sheet until I was covered from the waist down and rolled on to my back.

I said, “Hard to sleep these hot nights, isn’t it?”

She walked across the room and dropped to her knees beside the bed and settled back with her buttocks resting on her heels.

“Maybe a little warm milk,” I said.

She took my left hand where it was resting on my chest and pulled it over to her and held it between her breasts. “Sometimes counting. sheep helps,” I said. My voice was getting a little hoarse.

Her breath was very short, as if she’d been sprinting, and the place between her breasts was damp with sweat. She said, “Do with me what you will.”

“Wasn’t that the title of a book?” I said.

“I’ll do anything,” she said, “You may have me. I’ll be your slave. Anything.” She bent over, keeping my hand between her breasts and began to kiss me on the chest. Her hair smelled strongly of shampoo and her body of soap. She must have bathed before she came in.

“I’m not into slaves, Kath,” I said.

Her kisses were moving down over my stomach. I felt like a pubescent billy goat.

“Kathie,” I said. “I barely know you. I mean I thought we were just friends.”

She kept kissing. I sat up in bed and pulled my hand away from her sternum. She slid onto the bed as I made room, her whole body insinuated against me, her left hand running along my back.

“Strong,” she gasped. “Strong, so strong. Press me down, force me.”

I took hold of both her hands at the wrists and held them down in front of her. She twisted over and flopped on her back, her legs apart. Her mouth half open, making small creature sounds in her throat. The bedroom door opened and Hawk stood in it in his shorts, crouched slightly, bent for trouble. His face relaxed and broadened into pleasure as he watched.

“Goddamn,” he said.

“It’s okay, Hawk,” I said. “No trouble.” My voice was very hoarse.

“I guess not,” he said. He closed the door and I could hear his thick velvet laugh in the hall. He said through the closed door, “Hey, Spenser. You want me to stay out here and hum `Boots and Saddles’ sort of soft while you’re, ah, subduing the suspect?”

I let that pass. Kathie seemed uninterrupted.

“Him too,” she gasped. “Both at once if you wish.” She was almost boneless, sprawled on the bed, arms and legs flung out, her body wet with sweat.

“Kathie, you gotta find some other way to relate with people. Killing and screwing have their place but there are other alternatives.” I was croaking now. I cleared my throat loudly. My body felt like there was too much blood in it. I was nearly ready to paw the ground and whinny.

“Please,” she said, her voice now barely audible “please.”

“No offense, honey, but no.”

“Please,” she was hissing now. Her body writhed or the bed. She arched her pelvis up, as she had when Hawl searched her in Amsterdam. “Please. ” I still held her hands.

The more I held her and denied her the more she seemed to respond. It was a form of abuse and it excited her. Embarrassing or not, I had to get up. I slid out from unde the sheet and slipped off the bed, rolling over her legs as I did. She used the space I’d left to spread out wider in a position of enlarged vulnerability. One of the animal behaviorists would say she was in extreme submission. I was in extreme randiness. I took my Levis off the chair and put them on. I was careful zipping them up. With them on I felt better.

Kathie was alone now, I think she wasn’t even aware of me. Her breath came in thin hisses as it squeezed out between her teeth. She writhed and arched on the bed, the sheets a wet tangle beneath her. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like sucking my thumb but Hawk might come in and catch me. I wished Susan were here. I wished I weren’t. I sat on the other bed in the room, both feet on the floor, ready to jump if she came for me, and watched her.

The window got gray and then pink. The bird sounds increased, some trucks drove by somewhere outside, not many, and not often. The sun was up. In the other half of the duplex, water ran. Kathie stopped wrenching herself around. I heard Hawk get up next door and the shower start. Kathie’s breathing was quiet. I got up and went to my suitcase and took out one of my shirts and handed it to her. “Here,” I said. “I don’t have a robe, but this might do. Later we’ll buy you some clothes.”

“Why,” she said. Her voice was normal now but flat, and very soft.

“Because you need some. You’ve been wearing that dress for a couple of days now.”

“I mean why didn’t you take me?”

“I’m sort of spoken for,” I said.

“You don’t want me.”

“Part of me does, I was jumping out of my skin. But it’s not my style. It has to do with love. And, ah, your, your approach wasn’t quite right.”

“You think I’m corrupt.”

“I think you’re neurotic.”

“You fucking pig.”

“That approach doesn’t do it either,” I said. “Though Lots of people have used it on me.”

She was quiet, but a pink flush smudged across each cheekbone.

The shower stopped and I heard Hawk walk back to the bedroom.

“I guess I’ll shower now,” I said. “You ought to be out of here and wearing something when I’m through. Then we’ll all have a nice breakfast and plan our day.”

My shirt reached nearly to Kathie’s knees and she ate breakfast in it, silently, perched on a stool at the counter with her knees together. Hawk sat across the counter, splendid in a bell-sleeved white shirt. He was wearing a gold earring in his right ear, and a thin gold chain tight around his neck. The Bouchers had left some eggs and some white bread. I steam-fried the eggs with a small splash of white wine, and served the toast with apple butter.

Hawk ate with pleasure, his movements exact and sure, like a surgeon, or at least as I hoped a surgeon’s would be. Kathie ate without appetite but neatly, leaving most of the eggs and half the toast on her plate.

I said, “There’s some kind of clothing store down Boulevard St. Laurent. I saw it when we came up last night. Hawk, why don’t you take Kathie down there and get her some clothes?”

“Maybe she rather go with you, babe.”

Kathie said in a flat voice, softly, “I’d rather go with you, Hawk.” It was the first time I could remember her using his name.

“You ain’t gonna make a move on me in the car, are you?”

She dropped her head.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll clean up here and then I’ll think a little.”

Hawk said, “Don’t hurt yourself.”

I said, “Kathie, put on some clothes.”

She didn’t move and she didn’t look at me.

Hawk said, “Come on, girl, shake your ass. You heard the man.”

Kathie got up and went upstairs.

Hawk and I looked at each other. Hawk said, “You think she might be about to break the color barrier?”