Strachey's folly ds-7

by Richard Stevenson

  Luckily, Chondelle Dolan showed up just then. She had joined us at my request, to give us an update on the police investigation of Maynard's shooting.

  We preferred her company to Ray Craig's. We sat around one of the little tables on the sidewalk in front of the cafe, and we quickly spotted Craig repeatedly circling the block in an unmarked car; he cruised by and peered over at us every three or four minutes. This made Timmy nervous, but Chondelle said, "It's just Ray being Ray. When he's out in public, the department should make him wear a sign letting people know that he's relatively harmless."

  Timmy said, "Relatively?"

  "Yeah."

  "Relative to what?"

  "To a couple of other people in the department whose names I won't mention.

  The names wouldn't mean anything to you anyway, Timothy."

  Timmy shook his head, then changed the subject. He had gotten up early to go check on Maynard, and he said Maynard had opened his eyes several times, although he had not yet spoken.

  "It looks like he's going to be okay," Chondelle said. "That's the good report the division is getting, too."

  "I noticed," Timmy said, "that a D.C. police officer has been posted outside Maynard's room. Who arranged that? He wasn't there yesterday."

  "That was recommended by Lieutenant Craig."

  "Why?" Timmy said, looking up with a cappuccino mustache.

  "Ray's pursuing the drug-gang angle, and he told the captain he didn't want to risk losing a witness."

  I said, "Craig thinks Maynard might be a member of a drug gang? He tried that one out on us, too, but he seemed to have no basis for the theory other than that Maynard was shot by a man who looked Mexican."

  "Ray paints with a broad brush," Chondelle said. "A cousin ‹ ›f mine in the narcotics division told me Ray had requested any information they had on Maynard Sudbury, but the inquiry drew a blank. It's possible the request was just Ray covering his behind io justify the order for the hospital guard, which he wanted for some other reason."

  "Which might be what?" I asked.

  "Dunno. But I'd like to find out. One good thing, as far as you two are concerned, is this: Jim Suter's name hasn't come up anywhere in the Sudbury shooting investigation. Or anywhere else in the system. So if your aim is to keep his name out of this until you get to him, you're doing okay."

  "I'm going down to the Yucatan tomorrow," I said. "But it's a big place and I haven't got much of a lead for tracking Suter down. The problem is, if I try to get information by approaching people in Washington who know him, they might have connections to the people he says are trying to kill him. I'd tip them off to his location-or, if they already know where he is, to the fact that he's letting people know that he's in some kind of bad trouble. And they might just finish him off."

  I went on to describe to Chondelle my trip to Pennsylvania and my bewildering encounter with Mrs. Krumfutz. I told her how, despite Mrs. Krumfutz's essentially plausible denial of any knowledge of Jim Suter's current troubles, it was she, Timmy had learned, who had introduced Suter to the Mexican boyfriend Suter went to Mexico to be with-now, apparently, to hide out with.

  Chondelle said, "It sounds like it won't hurt if you just go ahead and ask Mrs.

  Krumfutz who the boyfriend is and where they are. If she's not involved in whatever it is Suter is afraid of, there's no risk at all for him or you. If she is involved, you've already alerted her that you're interested in Suter and there's not much more damage you can do than you've already done. Of course, if she thinks you've got something on her, then you can bargain with her. Unless she just lets on that she's going along with your wishes and then has Jim Suter shot dead and, just to be on the safe side, she arranges to have you blown away, too."

  Timmy flinched. I reached for my coffee cup.

  Chondelle went on, "But it sounds more like her husband is the baddie here, if anybody in the family is. So both of you are probably okay for now. Anyway, look-how about if Sudbury's friend Hively, the writer for the Blade, calls up Mrs.

  Krumfutz? Hively can say he's doing a story on the mysterious Jim Suter quilt panel, and he heard Suter was in Mexico with his boyfriend Jorge, and does she know how to get in touch with Jorge? Why wouldn't that work?"

  Timmy looked doubtful. "I don't think Hively would call Mrs. Krumfutz without some explanation from us as to what this is all about. He's a nosy reporter, after all. And if we tell him the truth, then he's involved in this-whatever it is-too. I don't want to do that to anybody else."

  Chondelle sipped from the second of the two double espressos she'd ordered, then said, "So what if Hively didn't call her, but somebody saying he was Bud Hively of the Washington Blade did? That would work just as well, if you ask me." She set her cup down, winked at me, and gazed at Timmy, waiting.

  Timmy said, "Uh-uh. Not me."

  "Why not?" Chondelle asked.

  "For one thing, I've always been a terrible liar."

  "It wouldn't take but a minute. You could prevaricate for one little minute, I'll bet."

  I said, "Timothy, it would just be a small social lie."

  He reddened. "No, it wouldn't. It would be much more than that."

  I said, "You see, Chondelle, he went to Georgetown. He was educated by Jesuits."

  "Yeah," she said, "Clinton went there, too, I hear."

  "Look, I'm not all that pompously self-righteous," Timmy said. "Jeez, give me a break. It's not that I've never told a lie. It's lhat I'm really bad at it. I'll blush and probably stutter."

  "Mrs. Krumfutz will never see you blush over the phone," I said. "And to her, you'll sound as if you're just another homosexual with a speech impediment."

  Timmy fumed for another minute, but finally agreed to impersonate newspaper reporter Bud Hively and phone Mrs. Krum-liitz. He said he guessed the morality of his doing so was sound overall, though muddy, and his biggest concern was his inepti-lude as a liar as a result of a paucity of experience. We kidded h i m some more about the lofty moral plane he lived on. It was one of the characteristics that had drawn me to Timmy nearly twenty years earlier, and which had made me want to remain with him through hard times and easy, except, of course, whenever his rigidity made me want to flee the sound of his voice.

  Five minutes later, after Chondelle had obtained Betty Krum-futz's Log Heaven phone number through a police department source, we sent Timmy to a pay phone around the corner on Pennsylvania Avenue to lie through his teeth.

  While Timmy was gone, Ray Craig made another pass and squinted over at us.

  He must have spotted Timmy at the pay phone and wondered what we were up to now. But Craig didn't stop. He just continued on down the block and hung a left at the corner.

  Timmy was back in three minutes. He was wearing a half smile as he seated himself. He slurped up some cappuccino from his cup.

  I said, "So?"

  He grinned a little dementedly. Now he knew he'd go to hell, but apparently he didn't give a fig. "Jorge is Jorge Ramos. Ramos and Suter met in her office, yes, but Mrs. Krumfutz doesn't know Ramos very well. He's a friend of Alan McChesney, who used to be her chief of staff in the House. McChesney now runs the office of Congressman Burton Olds. McChesney often vacations in Ramos's house on the Caribbean coast, below Can-cun, and Mrs. Krumfutz said that if Jim Suter is with Ramos, that's probably where they are. She gave me the name of the village near Playa del Carmen." Timmy lifted his cup again and drank from it.

  Chondelle said, "Nice work, Timothy. No offense intended, but it looks like you're a better fibber than you thought you were. It's nothing to be proud of, but it can come in handy, can't it?"

  I said, "So you are adept as a liar. This changes everything. I may never believe another word you say."

  "Neither of you two guys ever told a lie to the other one?" Chondelle asked.

  Timmy said, "No."

  I said, "Not for many years, so far as I am able to recall."

  "It was amazingly easy getting the information out of Mrs. Krumfutz," Timmy s
aid.

  "She asked me if our conversation would be off the record, and I said yes. She said she did not wish to be quoted in the Blade on anything having to do with the AIDS quilt, and she did not wish to have her name mentioned at all in connection with it. I said that was fine, that I just wanted to track down Jim Suter for a story I was writing about a quilt panel that had mysteriously appeared with Jim Suter's name on it, even though he is believed to be alive and well.

  "She said wasn't that odd, as if she'd never heard of the Suter panel. Obviously, I didn't mention your encounter with her, Don, and I didn't say anything about pages from Suter's campaign biography having been ripped off the panel-Bud Hively wouldn't have known about the campaign-bio pages. But I did ask her if she had visited the quilt display. She said no, she'd never seen it, but she said she'd heard it was big and colorful. Then I thanked her and said I supposed she was enjoying the fall foliage up in Pennsylvania-nature's quilt. She said, oh, yes, she certainly was."

  I said, "You actually called the Pennsylvania fall scenery 'nature's quilt'?"

  Timmy smiled slyly.

  Chondelle said, "Timothy, it sounds to me like you're a natural at this. If I ever need somebody to tell a big fat lie for a good cause, I'm gonna call you."

  Still looking almost smug, he said, "Don't bother. In the fu-lure, I'll only lie for Donald. This is something that's just be-iween me and my honey pie here."

  I said, "What in God's name have I done? I may need to take you back to the priests, Timothy, and sign you up for an ethical lune-up."

  He chuckled, but then Ray Craig rolled slowly by, and Timmy's mood abruptly darkened again. He said, "What does 11uit man want with us?"

  Chapter 12

  Bud Hively, the real one, was among Maynard's friends gathered at the ICU lounge outside the George Washington University Hospital unit where, by one o'clock Monday afternoon, Maynard was awake and answering yes-and-no questions by blinking. He had a black tube down his throat that looked like a creature from Alien emerging from his gullet, and so he was unable to speak.

  Only immediate family members were allowed into Maynard's room, two at a time, but Edwin Sudbury told the nurse in charge that we were all Maynard's siblings. "We're farmers," he said. "Big family." The nurse looked as if she had heard this many times before and did not find it clever, but she let us go in.

  A District of Columbia police officer was seated on a desk chair that had been wheeled over to the entrance to Maynard's room. He gave each of us who entered the room a quick onceover, but he made no body search and failed to conduct even perfunctory interrogations of Maynard's visitors. Were Maynard to be finished off by a visitor, the cop would be good for a vague description, I guessed, but not much more.

  Timmy and I went into the room together for a brief stay. Timmy spoke reassuring and affectionate words to Maynard, who stared up at us weakly, quizzically. He obviously had questions but no way of asking them. When Timmy asked him if he'd like an explanation as to why he was lying badly wounded in a hospital bed, Maynard blinked furiously, yes, yes. Timmy gave him a quick rundown of the shooting and the confusing aftermath. Maynard shook his head in amazement at Timmy's story. Then, apparently exhausted by his attempt to make sense of what had happened to him, he drifted off again. We gazed at Maynard a moment longer, outraged and sickened all over again at what had happened to our friend.

  Back in the ICU lounge, Timmy and I managed to maneuver Bud Hively, the Blade writer, and Dana Mosel, the Post reporter, into a corner and then brought the conversation around to Jim Suter and the mysterious quilt panel. Hively was interested in Suter's fate because he knew him, and Mosel had managed to wangle an assignment from the Post metro editor to follow up on the odd panel and the just-as-peculiar act of vandalism.

  "I talked to a woman at the Names Project in San Francisco," Mosel said, "and she gave me the name and address of the man in D.C. who submitted the panel last May. But there's no record of a David Phipps in or around the District.

  The phone number, which I called, is a fake, and the address is at a Capitol Hill Mailboxes, Etcetera. It would take a court order to find out who actually rented the box. Those private outfits contract with the Postal Service and they're subject to the same federal privacy laws that a post office has to observe."

  Mosel, a slender, pretty, auburn-haired woman in a linen suit and a pair of well-worn tennis shoes, had her notebook out and flipped through it in search of additional details she thought might interest us. She had told Timmy earlier that she'd been in the Peace Corps in Malawi in the midsixties, and she'd gotten to know Maynard through the former-Peace-Corps-volunteer writers' network. This was a web of several hundred people whose reach into U.S. journalism and letters seemed to resemble, as Mosel had described it, Pat Robertson's idea of the grip of the II-luminati on eighteenth-century Europe.

  "Amy Chavez, the Names Project staffer," Mosel went on, "was as mystified as everybody else by the Suter panel, and she said a lot of their people are unnerved by this thing. But they've never asked for death certificates or other documentation in the past, and she doubts they'll start doing it now. This type of weirdness just hasn't been a problem."

  Bud Hively said, "There's a respect for the quilt-a reverence almost-that's felt even by most of the people who think it absorbs angry emotions that should be fueling political action instead. There's one panel made by a dead man's friends who wrote on the panel, 'He hated this quilt and so do we.' But they're still part of it, even if they think it's wrong, and I don't think they would play games with the quilt or desecrate it."

  "No," Timmy said, "that would feel like an insult not to the quilt project but to all the people whose names are there."

  Hively, a muscular, pug-nosed man with a shaved head and a mustache the color and shape of the pyramid at Chichen Itza, said he thought whoever had sent in the panel memorializing a man who'd been alive when the panel was submitted must have been consumed with bitterness. Hively said, "He must have hated Jim deeply to do a thing like that. And I guess he must have hated the quilt, too, to have used it so selfishly."

  I said, "Do you know people who disliked Suter? Is he a man who makes enemies?"

  Hively smiled knowingly and a little sheepishly. "Jim Suter broke a lot of hearts in gay Washington over the years."

  "Yours included?" Mosel said. She still had her notebook out and added, "This is all on background, of course."

  "Yeah," Hively said, and laughed uneasily. "I had a fling with Jim ten or twelve years ago. He was-to put it mildly-one of the most attractive men in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia back then. Really one of the most dazzling-looking men I'd ever seen. He still is, in fact-or was the last time I saw him. Jim was also smart, sexy, energetic, and he knew everybody and everything that went on in this town. And he wasn't shy about letting you know how popular he was either. I spent a night with him one time, and I wandered into Jim's kitchen around ten on a Sunday morning. He was there fixing breakfast while he was dishing the dirt on the speakerphone with-guess who? Nancy Reagan."

  Timmy said, "God."

  I said, "I don't suppose Suter is as wired into the Clinton White House as he was back in the Reagan era, or is he?"

  "No, the Clinton gay mob-a large, moody, disappointed bunch of nice people, by and large-don't care much for Jim. His most intimate nonromantic ties have all been with Republicans," Hively said. "They knew he was gay, of course, but that didn't matter much to the Reagan crowd. These were Hollywood people. The Bush White House was stuffier, but even there Jim had his admirers."

  "And his enemies?" I said.

  Hively looked at me a little sadly now. "The people I know who didn't like Jim and some of them loathed him deeply- were not political or professional or social enemies. They were all men who had fallen in love with him-which is the easiest, most natural thing in the world-and whom he had led on, and taken into his arms for a time, and then abruptly dumped. Jim seemed to take a kind of sadistic pleasure in doing that. Over the pas
t twenty years, a lot-I mean a platoon, a battalion, a small army-of men have gone gaga over Jim Suter, and there were very few-only the dregs of the dregs really-that he ever turned away.

  "But then, after a week or two, that was it. He wasn't a one-night-stand-then-never-again man, he was a two-week-stand-Ihen-never-again man, a very, very cruel thing to be. It was always a week or two of bliss, then suddenly nothing. You are among the disappeared. He doesn't return your calls, he ignores you in public. And I am speaking to you not just from hearsay- although that's plentiful-but from grim experience. I'm over it now, I think. But for years I despised Jim Suter because he did lo me what he always does to men. He wrecked my head and then he broke my heart."

  Mosel said, "Doesn't word get around that guys should avoid this shithead?"

  "Sure," Hively said, "but in a transient town like D.C. there are always new heads arriving to be turned. And Jim has always been such a hunk that even men who know what they're in for often can't resist him. And even some who've heard of his rotten habit have to see for themselves what the big attraction is, and the repulsion, too."

  Timmy said, "Maynard doesn't seem all that bitter about his affair with Suter. He said it didn't work out because he didn't like Suter's politics and he thought Suter was emotionally erratic. But it sounded as if it was a mutual parting of the ways and that was all."

  "Maynard was a special case for Jim," Hively said. "Maynard is so self-confident and self-contained that as soon as Suter turned distant, Maynard just let it go.

  He once told me that he began to lose interest in Jim as soon as Jim started ignoring his calls. Maynard said that in Southern Illinois people just don't treat each other that way. It's rude, he told me. But then Jim turned around and started pursuing Maynard again. He always had to be the one doing the rejecting. So Maynard came back for a while, and then Jim backed off again, and soon afterwards, that was that. They both saw the game that was being played, and soon they'd both had enough of it."