Strachey's folly ds-7

by Richard Stevenson

  "What you and I are going to do now, Donald, is we're going to walk out to my patrol car-you walking ahead of me- and you're going to get into the backseat, and you're going to sit down there while I shut the door. Do you understand that, Donald?"

  "Yep."

  "Just a minute," Mrs. Krumfutz said, and walked closer to the cop and me without ever quite joining either of us. "Let's just have a look at that license of yours, Mr. Donald-the-Private-Investigator."

  As the cop held open my wallet, Mrs. Krumfutz came closer to him and squinted at it briefly. She said to me, "Donald Stra-chey. Why, I think I know just who you are."

  "Oh?"

  "Who is he?" the cop said.

  "Horse," she said, forcing a tight grin, "I think this might be all right."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "Could I speak to Donald privately for just a second? This may be just a teeny-tiny bit personal. If you know what I mean," she added, and let loose with an outburst that was half cough and half cackle.

  Officer Henderson didn't seem to like the way all this was heading. Clearly, the correct procedure here was to lock me in the cruiser while he ran my name through the computer. But, owing to her celebrity status-not just as a pro-life, pro-gun former congresswoman but as a pro-life, pro-gun former congresswoman who had been involved in a scandal that had gripped the Susquehanna valley at six and eleven for many weeks-Mrs. Krumfutz was a woman whose wishes could reasonably be viewed as something akin to authoritative and would thus supplant any normal routine.

  Henderson said, "He's not armed. If you'd like to step inside, I'll stand by. Holler if you need help."

  "Thanks, Horse." Mrs. Krumfutz gestured for me to follow her.

  We went into the house and she shut the door behind us. Instead of remaining near the door, she led me across the kitchen, through another door, and into the garage. A dim overhead light went on automatically.

  I said, "You don't want us to be within earshot of Officer Henderson. Is that right?"

  "Yes," she hissed, and her black eyes bore into me. "All right, Mr. Peeping Tom, you can spit it out right now. Are you working for Nelson?"

  "I am unable to identify my client, Mrs. Krumfutz. I'm sorry."

  "Maybe you'll be able to identify your client," she said evenly, "if I go get my Walther PK-38 and threaten to blow your face off. Would that make a difference?"

  She talked like an NRA fund-raising letter, and I'd run into gun people before and knew they could be dangerous. Also, I wasn't sure there weren't two Mexican hit men somewhere in the house. I looked at Mrs. Krumfutz and wondered if I should make a break for it out the front while she was still unarmed and before Luis and Hector appeared. The problem was, the cop knew my name and had my car ID-in fact, he was still holding my wallet.

  Mrs. Krumfutz said, "Cat got your tongue, dog's breath?"

  Recklessly I said, "I saw you."

  She went white. Then suddenly her color returned with a rush, and she snapped, "I don't give a hoot! It doesn't make a bit of difference. I've got plenty on Nelson. I know it and he knows it!"

  "What have you got?"

  "I've still got my scrapbook, and Nelson knows I've got it. If that man messes with me, believe you me, I'll put him in the hoosegow for the rest of his life. Just don't tempt me, Donald. You tell him that. Just don't tempt Betty, tell him. And if anything happens to me-if they find my body dumped on the Log Heaven levee some fine morning-that's it. It all goes to the prosecutors, the whole kit and caboodle. Friends of mine have their definite instructions."

  "You seem to have made thorough arrangements, Mrs. Krumfutz. I'm impressed. You're quite a force to be reckoned with. Tell me more."

  "I'll tell you not one more blessed thing. Now get out of my house and out of Log Heaven, and take your filth with you!"

  "My filth?"

  "You tracked mud through my kitchen! I'd make you stay and mop it up, but I'm sick to death of you and everything you and my husband represent, and I want you out of here now. I'll fix it with Horse Henderson. I just want you out of my house!"

  "I'll be happy to go, but I want you to understand one thing, Mrs. Krumfutz, and understand it clearly. If you unleash your Mexican paid killers, and if anything happens to Jim Suter- anything at all, now or in the distant future-I will expose you. You'll pay. You'll go down the rest of the way. All the rest of the way.

  Do you understand me?"

  She stood there looking baffled. "Hit men? My Lord, is that what Nelson thinks?

  Don't be silly. And Jim Suter? You mean Jim Suter the writer?"

  "Who else?"

  "Donald, I don't know what in the Sam Hill you're even talking about. One of us must be crazy as a loon. What's Jim Suter got to do with it?"

  Chapter 10

  Mrs. Krumfutz just snickered at the idea of Mexican paid killers, and she found it preposterous that Jim Suter had any connection at all to her husband's criminal activity, the exact nature of which I could not get her to specify. I thought her repeated references to "my scrapbook" referred to additional records she had kept on the campaign-finance scam, but I wasn't sure of it, and as she began to sense how little I actually knew about her husband's activities, she grew even cagier and less forthcoming on that subject. Nor did Jim Suter seem to have anything to do with whatever it was that had gone on in Mrs. Krumfutz's house that night and which I pretended to have witnessed but hadn't actually. I had only just seen two people kneeling side by side, or so it seemed.

  Moreover, Mrs. Krumfutz denied visiting the AIDS quilt the day before and having fled in fear from Jim Suter's panel. Nor could she imagine why anyone would sew a section of her campaign biography on an AIDS quilt panel.

  "Is Jim dead from AIDS?" she gasped. "But you just talked as if he's alive."

  "He is alive, but he's in danger."

  "What do you mean? How do you know?"

  How much could I tell her? It had all gotten too confusing. Was she putting on an act? This was possible. Here was a woman who had been elected to Congress with the backing of the pious religious right, yet in private she connived like and spoke in the language of an Albany Democratic-machine ward healer, circa 1935.

  Taking no chances, I said, "Jim may be in trouble, but I don't know where he is or exactly what the problem is. On behalf of a mutual friend, I'm watching out for him and his interests."

  Now she looked perplexed all over again. "Nelson is taking an interest in Jim Suter? That's hard to believe. Nelson always called Jim 'that fairy writer.' Jim's a homosexual, you know." "I know."

  "As far as I was concerned, Jim being a homo was up to him. I hired him to write literature for my congressional campaign."

  "Uh-huh."

  "Homosexuals always end up in trouble." "Where were you yesterday afternoon," I asked, "if you weren't at the AIDS quilt?"

  "That is none of your concern. None whatsoever." "Three people saw you at the quilt."

  "No, they didn't. They might think they did, but they didn't. Or, those three people are bald-faced liars."

  I had been one of the three-Timmy and Maynard were the others-who had seen a woman Maynard had identified as Mrs. Krumfutz examining Jim Suter's quilt panel on Saturday and then rushing away, frantic and distraught. And yet, when I'd turned up spying on her through a rear window of her house fifteen minutes earlier, Mrs. Krumfutz gave no indication that she had ever seen me before. Or was that an act? And if it wasn't-what? Were there two Betty Krumfutzes?

  "Have you got any sisters, Mrs. Krumfutz?" "Yes, why?" "Do you have a twin?"

  "You mean an evil twin, Donald? No. My sister, Fran, is older and a good bit heavier than I am. She lives in Engineville and she's never been farther south than Harrisburg. So nobody saw her at the AIDS quilt, that's for darn sure.

  Anyway, she'd be afraid of catching it."

  "I understand that you ran an antigay TV ad against your opponent in your first Republican primary. He'd accepted a donation from a college gay group, and you hit him hard for it, saying th
is showed he would support same-sex kissing instruction in the public schools. Wasn't that unfair?"

  "Sure, it was unfair. So what? Advertising is unfair. Politics is unfair. Life is unfair.

  I'm not here to promote fairness. I never said I was."

  "Oh, I see. What are you here to promote, Mrs. Krumfutz?"

  I'd walked right into it. She gazed at me serenely out from under her cherry-pie-motif head scarf-she seemed to have some device stuck in her pinned-back hair, but I couldn't make out what it was-and said, "I believe I have been put on this earth to promote the right to bear arms and the rights of the unborn. I know in my heart that in both cases-no matter how ruthless and cold-blooded my means may seem to some people-I am doing the Lord's work. Any other questions?"

  I couldn't think of any.

  Mrs. Krumfutz was able to convince Horse Henderson that my spying was just one unsavory feature of a nasty divorce proceeding, and she told him that she preferred not to press charges against me. She said she had nothing to hide and that her prosecuting me locally might suggest to some people that she did have some dirty laundry to cover up, even though it wasn't true. "You know how people are," she said, and Officer Henderson said he did. He returned my wallet and let me go, although plainly he wasn't happy about it.

  I drove back into downtown Log Heaven and stopped at the only eatery open on Main Street, an old greasy-elbow diner called Teddy's. It had a grill in the steamed-up window laid out with rows of wieners, the ones on the left burnt umber, the ones on the right mauve. I went in and had two burnt umber ones with chili sauce, plus a cup of high-octane coffee. There would be plenty of opportunities back in Albany for arugula and bent-twig tea. To deal with the Krumfutzes, I needed fat and caffeine.

  When I came out of Teddy's, a squat man who'd been leaning against the building when I went in spoke to me. He said, "Duh-buh." His hand came out of his windbreaker pocket and he tipped his porkpie hat.

  This one, I was sure, wasn't part of any plot, big or small. He was just a contemporary fixture of Main Street America. I said, "Nice night."

  As I got into my rental car and drove away, the man watched me go.

  I gassed up at a convenience store, punched sixty or eighty digits into a pay phone, and reached Timmy. It was after ten and he was back in our room at the Capitol Hill Hotel.

  "Maynard is showing signs of regaining consciousness. We're all trying to be optimistic." Timmy added some clinical details, then said, "I've also been doing some discreet detective work that's paid off."

  "Hey, good for you."

  "I've gotten to know a lot of Maynard's friends and his brother Edwin, and Edwin's wife, Laurie. They're a good bunch, and being with them today has made this thing a whole lot easier."

  "Great. What was the discreet detective work that paid off?" "It turns out that one of

  Maynard's friends knows Jim

  Suter, too."

  "You brought Suter's name up? Isn't that risky?"

  "Why? Do you suspect there's a big, wide-ranging, monstrous conspiracy under way involving dozens of corrupt and dangerous people? Hmm."

  "You know what I mean." I hadn't even told him yet that since my confusing encounter with Betty Krumfutz I no longer had any idea what to think. "I just thought we had agreed to play it safe and not bring Suter into it until I had caught up with him in Mexico and heard his end of the story."

  "The thing is, I didn't have to bring Suter's name up. People had seen the quilt vandalism story on television, and when they were discussing it, one guy mentioned he knew Jim Suter and he was shocked. He didn't think Suter had AIDS and he didn't think he was dead. This guy, Bud Hively, a writer at the Blade, the D.C. gay newspaper, said he had seen Suter six or eight weeks earlier, and that Suter had told him he was leaving soon for Mexico. Suter didn't mention any danger he was in- or at least Hively never brought it up. Suter just told Hively he had a boyfriend in the Yucatan and he was planning on spending the winter down there."

  "Did you extract any other details, I hope? Such as who's the boyfriend, or what he does or where he lives?"

  "I didn't learn as much as I'd have liked. I mean, how nosy could I afford to appear?" "Not very."

  "I did find out that the boyfriend's first name is Jorge and that he and Suter would actually be living in two locations. The boyfriend has a place in Merida as well as a beach house on the Caribbean coast south of Cancun. And he's financially well-off, Hively said."

  "This is a start. All I have to do to locate Suter is find well-off Jorge of Merida and Cancun."

  "There are two other possibly helpful shreds of data. One is, Maynard's friend Dana Mosel, a Post reporter who was at the hospital with us, is doing a follow-up story on the quilt vandalism. She was as intrigued as everybody else by the idea that an AIDS quilt panel had shown up memorializing a living person. She asked Bud Hively for a list of Suter's family, friends, and acquaintances, and as Hively was reciting those he knew, I memorized them and later I wrote them down. I think I bollixed up only a couple of the names."

  "That is good work, Timothy. You'll be rewarded for this." "Thanks. I'm keeping my head, Don. I really am. Even if I'm really still quite frightened. I'm chained and dead-bolted in our room and I can't wait for you to get back here. So you're actually coming back to D.C. tonight? I got your message. How come you're not staying up in Pennsylvania?"

  I gave him a ninety-second version of my abbreviated visit to Log Heaven: how I had learned of the sometime-gun-toting Mexicans who'd done a "job" for Betty Krumfutz; how I had been caught prowling behind her house and ended up confronting her; how she assumed I was working for her husband and I let this misapprehension stand in order to facilitate my escape from the Log Heaven Police Department; and how it now appeared that Mrs. Krumfutz had no connection to Jim Suter's danger and that the job the Mexicans had performed so ably for the former congresswoman seemed to have been no more than yard work.

  But, I told Timmy, Mrs. Krumfutz had lied to both me and the Log Heaven cop when she said she was alone in the house. And she did have, I had learned, a guilty secret that her husband could blackmail her with once he discovered what it was, which she now believed he had-although she had the goods on him, too, and their battles with each other now appeared to be stalemated.

  Timmy said, "So you don't think she's involved in Jim's danger or the attack on Maynard?"

  "I'm inclined to doubt it. Anyway, I think I am. For now."

  "Then who was that frightened woman at the quilt that Maynard thought was Betty Krumfutz?"

  "Beats me."

  "So you've more or less decided she's not involved at all in what's going on here?"

  "I think I've decided that. But I'm not sure."

  "Hmm."

  "Mrs. Krumfutz is certifiably amoral and devious on behalf of her causes. She brags about that. And her husband I'm even less sure about. Also, according to the missus, Nelson Krumfutz has been up to his neck in something that could land him in prison for the rest of his life. She says she's got proof, so my guess is it's more campaign-fund chicanery. And this might or might not be the criminality that Jim Suter says certain dangerous persons think he knows about.

  Anyway, I'm not getting anywhere near Nelson just yet. First it's important that I talk to Suter."

  Timmy breathed deeply. "Well, I hate to say this."

  "What?"

  Two more noisy inhalations.

  "What? What?"

  "The other thing I found out from Bud Hively about Suter and his Mexican boyfriend is this: Jim met his terrific new boyfriend, he told Hively, through a friend who Jim wouldn't normally have thought of as a person who'd be serving as a gay dating service. And that friend is-you don't want to hear it- Betty Krumfutz."

  "Oh?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Hell."

  "Yeah."

  "Well, it'll all come clear. But not tonight. I'm leaving Log Heaven now. I should arrive down there between two and three. I'll ring you from the hotel lobby so you can
let me in. Okay?"

  "Sure. Drive carefully."

  "I will. Traffic will be light."

  As I rang off, I remembered something. I pulled from my pocket the letter Jim Suter had sent to Maynard from Mexico. I looked at the way he had signed it:

  "Your friend Jim, still unlucky in love." Did that mean, as it seemed to, that the wonderful boyfriend had not worked out?

  Before I left Log Heaven for the drive to D.C., I made a final swing past Mrs.

  Krumfutz's house on Susquehanna Drive. All the lights were out now-it was just past ten-thirty-but the pickup truck was still in the driveway next to the Chrysler. I made a U-turn and pulled up the driveway so that my headlights caught the truck's rear plate. I noted the number and the state, Texas, then backed out and drove quickly-but not so quickly as to attract attention-out to the interstate.

  Chapter 11

  I awoke midmorning on Monday to a warm and hazy blue day, with the Washington outside my hotel window all but shut down for the federal holiday.

  This twenty-four-hour memorial to Christopher Columbus was primarily an Italian-American holiday, even though Columbus had been on the royal Spanish payroll in 1492 and had actually opened up the New World for Spanish, not Italian, conquest. What if Columbus had sailed west, say, on behalf of the Venetian Republic? How would the Americas be different today? Politics and government in many nations might more readily be carried out with the consent of the governed. For hundreds of years people would have traveled up and down the North and South American continents not on horseback but in gondolas, and later vaporetti. Instead of eating rice and beans, people south of the Rio Grande would sup on brodetto and seppie alia veneziana.

  I laid out this historical conjecture for Timmy over good coffee and even better croissants at a Second Street cafe. He explained to me that in 1492 Venice had its own lucrative easterly routes to Asia and would have had no need to go sloshing off into the unknown western seas. I told him he was missing my point.

  He wouldn't drop it though and insisted on asking what my point was.