Strachey's folly ds-7

by Richard Stevenson

  Chapter 8

  Log Heaven, Pennsylvania, was up in the thinly populated central part of the state off Interstate 80. The autumn foliage was at its brilliant peak under a high blue sky crisscrossed with big, floating jet vapor trails that looked like ancient glyphs above the earth. I wondered what they meant. Probably Scranton-Pittsburgh, Baltimore-Toronto. The broad highway swept between and sometimes up and down the state's old, worn, friendly mountains, and I wished Timmy were along to enjoy the scenic ride.

  He was back in Washington, where we had met some of Maynard's friends when they converged on GW University Hospital. Some of them were going to maintain a watch at the hospital-Maynard's condition was unchanged when I left early Sunday afternoon-and others planned on cleaning up Maynard's house in hopeful anticipation of Maynard's recovery and eventual return.

  Neither Timmy nor I told Maynard's friends about Jim Suter's mysterious quilt panel or the letter from Mexico full of warnings. So everyone who knew Maynard remained baffled as to why he might have been shot down in the street and his home ransacked. Some of them speculated on a book or an article he might have been working on that exposed foreign criminality of some sort, but no one could recall Maynard's mentioning any such project. On the contrary, everyone said, Maynard had been doing relatively undemanding straight travel writing since he'd picked up his stomach ailment.

  A couple of times I referred to Maynard's recent trip to Mexico. I thought it might jog someone's memory of any remark Maynard might have made about Jim Suter. But Maynard either never told anyone of the odd meeting in Merida, or none of his acquaintances considered it worth mentioning now.

  Chondelle Dolan was able to use her GOP Capitol Hill contacts-she'd once been involved, she had told me that morning, with the first black female member of the Log Cabin Club-to track down former congresswoman Krumfutz. On the staff now of the conservative Glenn Beale Foundation, Mrs. Krumfutz kept an apartment in Washington as well as her Log Heaven home, which she often visited on weekends. She had driven up to Pennsylvania Saturday evening with a friend, Chondelle said, several hours after Maynard had pointed her out to Timmy and me at the Jim Suter quilt panel.

  I'd made a plane reservation for a flight to the Yucatan on Tuesday morning. I figured twenty-four hours in Log Heaven would give me enough time to confront Mrs. Krumfutz and extract from her what was extractable concerning her examination on Saturday of the Suter quilt panel and her subsequent panicked, hasty departure from the quilt display and then from Washington. I knew I ran some risk of tipping off the people who had shot Maynard-whoever and whatever they wereand of further endangering Suter. But I convinced myself that the risk was slight and worth taking.

  Timmy's Capitol Hill friend Bob Bittner had briefed me on the Krumfutz illegal-campaign-fund scandal-at Timmy's request, Bittner did not ask why I was inquiring about this-and I learned that not only had Mrs. Krumfutz been cleared of any involvement in the scam, but that she had been eager to disassociate herself from her husband, who had spent many tens of thousands of dollars of congressional campaign donations on the home and wardrobe of one Tammy Pam Jameson, of Engineville, near Log Heaven. Mrs. Krumfutz had eagerly testified against her husband at his trial, and I concluded that if she had more recently uncovered additional criminality-by way of the AIDS quilt or otherwise-she would be more inclined to talk about it to me or to the police than to anyone involved in the crime, especially her low slug of a husband. And I did not plan on tracking down Nelson Krumfutz-now residing in Engineville with Tammy Pam, I was told-just yet.

  I pulled into Log Heaven in the black shadows of the surrounding mountains under a fall sunset that was a puddle of fire. The sky looked like a Jehovah's Witness's Watchtower magazine cover, and I remembered that the millennium was just a few years away. Maybe Armageddon would start off in Log Heaven. It seemed as likely a place as any, despite warnings from the TV preachers that when Good rose up and vanquished Evil, San Francisco would get it first. Then the West Village, the East Village, and Chelsea. Would a wrathful God spare SoHo? Park Slope? TriBeCa? This was unclear.

  I cruised down Log Heaven's Main Street, with its three-block-long business district that looked half-dead and half-hanging-on-by-a-fraying-economic-thread.

  Most of the storefronts were vacant, and the few that weren't were occupied by social-service agencies and businesses with names like Natalie's Nail Heaven, Fenstermacher's Tanning Parlor ("Tan Yer Fanny by the Susquehanny"), and the Mattress Madness Outlet Store. Three big furniture factories I'd passed on the edge of town were dark and boarded up, and the only sizable employer I spotted was a mobile-home assembly plant. I doubled back up River Street.

  The Susquehanna, one of the loveliest streams in America, was no longer visible from the town that the river had apparently once made prosperous.

  Somebody-the Army Corps of Engineers, I suspected-had put up a thirty-foot-high, earth-and-stone dike-levee system, a flood-control solution common across floodplain America now, and in its unimaginativeness and inelegance, worthy of the mind of Benito Mussolini. It looked as if in Log Heaven, the walled-off Susquehanna survived largely for the esthetic pleasure of an occasional small-plane pilot and in the minds of the old people.

  Back on the outskirts of town, I pulled my rental car into the Bit o' Heaven Motel and checked in. The clerk, a stout, middleaged woman with a fresh perm and pale teddy bears on her pink blouse, smelled of Ivory soap and Kraft macaroni-and-cheese dinner. When I asked about getting a bite to eat, she suggested that I try Pizza Hut or Karen's Kozy Korner, both up the road. She said they were both good.

  I checked the Log Heaven-Engineville phone book and found that Betty Krumfutz was not listed. I told the clerk I was a reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer — it seemed like an efficient enough little fib-and I asked for directions to the Krumfutz residence.

  "I feel sorry for that woman," the clerk said. "Betty got a raw deal."

  "Yes, her husband was the wrongdoer," I agreed.

  "She's a celebrity, but it's taken a toll. Is the Inquire going after her now?" She pronounced Inquirer "IN-quire," which I'd never heard before, and she seemed ready to be annoyed.

  "No, it'll be a favorable piece. Betty's had a tough row to hoe. And far be it from the Inquirer to add to her woes."

  The clerk told me that her husband's mother "still reads the Inquire" — an eccentricity of the elderly, it was made to sound like-and she'd ask her to save my article. Then she told me how to find the Krumfutz house on Susquehanna Drive in Log Heaven. She said she thought Betty would be home; the clerk had a friend who was in Betty's target-practice group, which met on Sunday afternoons. So Betty always made it a point to be in Log Heaven on Sundays, "for church and target practice."

  "What do they shoot?" I asked.

  The clerk looked puzzled. "Bottles and cans and things like that, I guess."

  "With guns?"

  "Why, yes. It's the gun-club members."

  "Who all is in the gun club? Hunters? Sportsmen?"

  She nodded, beginning to look a little suspicious of this in-lerrogation.

  I took a wild stab and said, "An American citizen's constitutional right to bear arms is the envy of the world. I was speaking to a Canadian recently who was thinking of emigrating to the United States so that he could keep his own firearm for self-protection. He drives down to Watertown, New York, once a week for target practice there. Are there any foreigners like that in the Log Heaven gun club? Or, I guess Log Heaven is too far from the border for that."

  "Funny you should ask that," the motel clerk said. "Both Luis and Hector are in the gun club, I know. They work in the kitchen at the Kozy Korner. Karen's in the gun club and she got her two Mexicans to join, she told me. But she said they already knew how to shoot, and they actually taught her a thing or two. But I doubt if they came to America for target practice. They came to get work.

  Which I say, more power to them. You try to get our kids to wash dishes these days, and you might as well ask them
to fly to the moon. It's even hard to get kids these days who'll rake and bag leaves. They might get their hands dirty. But Luis and Hector, why they'll even do yard work. As a matter of fact, they've been doing work lately around the Krumfutz place. Karen said Betty had hired Hector and Luis for some type of work she had, and Betty told Karen that she was quite satisfied with the good job they did."

  Chapter 9

  Mexicans with guns? I locked the door behind me in my room at the Bit o'

  Heaven and sat on the edge of the bed. I held my right hand out and checked it for steadiness. The tremor was minor but discernible. My Smith amp; Wesson was back in Albany-why would I have carried a firearm to a display of the AIDS quilt? — but suddenly up in Log Heaven what I was thinking hard about was protecting myself. Was I panicking, like Timmy? Was I reacting stupidly to an ethnic stereotype?

  I made a credit-card call to Timmy's and my room at the Capitol Hill Hotel but got no answer. I guessed Timmy was off at GW with Maynard and his friends and, maybe by now, May-nard's brother and sister-in-law. I got hold of the hotel desk and left a message for Timmy, informing him that I would not be staying over in Log Heaven that night after all, but would be returning to Washington late.

  I did not explain that I was afraid of being unarmed in a town where two Mexican sharpshooters with connections to Betty Krumfutz were on the loose; I kept it vague. Then I called GW and learned that Maynard was still "stable," a promising sign.

  I showered, rumpled the sheets to make the bed look as if it had been slept in, repacked my bag, left the key on the desk, and went out into the cold, black Pennsylvania night. I threw my bag in the car and drove away from the Bit o'

  Heaven Motel. The next day, Monday, was going to be Columbus Day, but I figured that even if Betty Krumfutz remained in Log Heaven for the holiday, she would probably not run into Karen, of Karen's Kozy Korner, until the following Sunday at target-shooting practice and possibly learn that a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter had been in Log Heaven intent on interviewing her-a reporter who had then mysteriously failed to show up at Mrs. Krumfutz's door.

  I drove up the highway past K Mart, past E-Z Mart, past Pizza Hut, Valu-Video, and Hall's Beer Distributor to the Kozy Korner. It wasn't on a corner and with its cold-white-light and Formica interior it wasn't cozy. Two specials were scrawled on a blackboard propped next to the cash register. The fried haddock with FF amp; apple sauce was $3-85- The ham croquettes with mac and cheese was $3.15.

  I asked the round, clear-skinned young woman who took my order-I couldn't resist the croquettes-if she was Karen. She smiled, showing me her braces, and said uh-uh, she was Stacy; Karen didn't come in on Sunday.

  While I waited, I read the ads on my place mat for a tire store, a sealer of driveways, and, among others, Ron Diefender-fer, CPA, and Helen's Pitch-n-putt.

  The other tables and booths at the Kozy Korner were occupied mainly by middle-aged and elderly married couples who had apparently run out of anything to say to each other some years back. They seemed to take their gratification from their haddock, which I figured they knew they had earned. At a table near the back, three voluble older women sat, loudly comparing doctors with Indian names. They liked Dr. Patel best because, one woman said, he didn't give you the bum's rush.

  I could see over the counter and through a big window into the kitchen. I saw no Mexicans there, just a woman in a blue smock; her origins looked local. She seemed to be the cook, and a skinny teenaged boy in a baseball cap that was on frontward- was this a clue? — washed dishes.

  I enjoyed the comfort food, which I followed with plain coffee-no sign was up announcing "brussels sprouts" or "Ro-bitussin" as the ground-roast flavor of the day-and I had a small saucer of rice pudding. The bill came to just over five dollars, including tip. Driving back into Log Heaven, I exercised my tongue as I attempted to pry loose the mac and cheese still stuck to the roof of my mouth. I got most of it.

  Just after nine o'clock, I parked the car along Susquehanna Drive across from the address for Betty Krumfutz that the motel clerk had given me. I was up on a bluff on the western outskirts of Log Heaven. To my right was a sharp drop-off, with the river in the darkness below. Across the street to my left was a wide, split-level flagstone ranch house on a partially wooded hillside. A broad driveway, newly tarmacked, ran up to a two-car garage. A gray Chrysler LeBaron with Pennsylvania plates was parked on one side of the driveway, a Chevy pickup truck with plates I didn't recognize was on the other.

  Lights were on behind the drawn drapes in the big picture window. Another room was lit-the kitchen? — between the living room and the garage. There were no floodlights or other illumination outside the house. Clouds had moved in, and I decided that I could get away with a quick bout of voyeurism under cover of the October darkness. I knew that if I was caught by the Log Heaven police, I would have no plausible explanation I could safely provide them for spying on former congress-woman Krumfutz. And if Mrs. Krumfutz and her two Mexican shootists got hold of me, I might long to be in the custody of local law officers. But a quick look around seemed minimally risky, so I got out of the car and shut the door quietly.

  Susquehanna Drive was also the main road to Engineville, twenty-six miles upriver, where Nelson Krumfutz and his girlfriend, Tammy Pam Jameson, now consorted. Traffic to En-gineville on Sunday night was sparse, so I had no trouble ambling across the road apparently sight unseen. The nearest streetlight was a quarter of a mile east, and the houses on either side of the Krumfutz place were lit inside but with the shades drawn. I strode directly up the Krumfutz front lawn, passed under a good-sized maple-black trash bags apparently stuffed with fallen leaves had been piled up alongside the driveway- and on to the back of the property. I lingered there for a couple of minutes getting used to the darkness and listening for any pets Mrs. Krumfutz or her neighbors might have had on the loose. I'd once had, in a similar set of circumstances, an encounter with a warthog in a poodle suit that I did not want to repeat.

  I went around to the darkened rear ell section of the house. I passed an air conditioner jutting out from a window-I could just make it out in the near-darkness-and I was careful not to whack into it. What if, when he hit the air conditioner, OJ. had been knocked unconscious? What if Kato had gone out with a flashlight and discovered O.J., knocked out, with a bag full of bloody clothes? Whom would Kato have phoned? Nine one one? William Morris? O.J.'s dry cleaner? How might it all have turned out differently? I wondered.

  Staying close to the wall of the house, I moved across a stone terrace to the sliding glass doors that I estimated were opposite the picture window out front.

  Heavy white drapes blocked my view in-and Mrs. Krumfutz's view out-so I continued on beyond the doors to a smaller, darkened window that looked in on what appeared to be a breakfast nook. The Venetian blinds were only half-shut, so by standing close to the window on the far side I found an angle that afforded a line of sight into the living room behind the drapes.

  "Don't move!"

  I turned, and a bright light hit my face.

  "I want to see your hands!"

  "You bet."

  "Both of them!"

  "Two is my limit."

  A floodlight mounted on the side of the house came on, illuminating the entire terrace, and I saw that the man with the flashlight in one hand and a drawn revolver in the other was wearing a police uniform.

  "Assume the position!" the cop barked.

  That phraseology had always sounded like something out of my high school debating-club days, but I knew what this man meant.

  "Spread 'em! Get 'em up!"

  I pressed my palms against the wall of the house as the cop patted me down.

  He had pocketed his flashlight, but he still held the police special. A door opened off to my right, and I heard a nasal female voice say, "What's going on?

  Horse, what in the world are you doing?"

  "Speck Spindler saw somebody in your yard, Mrs. Krumfutz, and called it in. It's this guy here!"


  "Oh, for heaven sakes!"

  As the cop yanked my wallet out of my jacket pocket, I turned far enough to catch sight of a bulky woman in a pale green sweat suit. With her small mouth open in a look of shocked surprise, she was identical to the woman I'd seen the day before at Jim Suter's quilt panel, minus the shades and the golf-cart-motif head scarf. Mrs. Krumfutz did have a bandanna tied around her head, but instead of golf carts it had pictures of cherry pies all over it. I knew they were cherry because each pie had a C carved in the crust.

  "Are you all right, Mrs. Krumfutz?" the cop said as he flipped through my wallet with one hand.

  "Yes, Horse, I'm just fine. Don't worry about me. Who is he?"

  "Is there someone else here with you?"

  "No, but this fella didn't get inside. Who is he?"

  It was not true that Mrs. Krumfutz had been alone in her house. In the instant before the cop-Officer "Horse" seemed to be his name-came upon me and shouted, I had caught a fleeting image of two figures in the Krumfutz living room.

  They had seemed to be kneeling on the floor side by side, but it all happened so quickly that I couldn't be sure of what I had seen.

  "His name is Donald Strachey." To me the cop boomed, "Are you Donald Strachey?"

  "Yes."

  "What do you think you're doing on this property?"

  "Conducting an investigation."

  "An investigation? What do you mean, an investigation?"

  "I'm a private investigator licensed in the state of New York.

  My card is in the wallet." At this, Mrs. Krumfutz, I thought, flinched.

  "If the laws of New York are anything like the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I don't think you're licensed to trespass," the cop said. "Now turn around slowly and look at me."

  I turned and faced a big, ruddy-faced youth with clear blue eyes and a name tag that read "Patrolman Lewis Henderson Jr."