Strachey's folly ds-7

by Richard Stevenson

  "I wonder what 'a number of leads' means," Timmy said. "Is it a high number of leads or a low number of leads, and what are they?"

  "That's just a thing police say to reporters," I told him. "It doesn't necessarily mean anything."

  "I guess we're two of the leads if they're following us around."

  I had relayed to Timmy the night before Chondelle's report to me on the D.C.

  Police Department's twenty-four-hour surveillance of the both of us, and he had received the news glumly.

  "The other lead," I said, "is the two witnesses to the shooting saying two Mexicans did it."

  "The police are not releasing that information to the press. I wonder why. That makes me nervous."

  "I have to admit, Timothy, that I'm curious about that, too. Craig may actually know more about the shooter and his friend than Chondelle has been able to find out. And maybe whatever he knows has got this Captain Kingsley flying down to the Yucatan the same day I'm flying. It would seem unlikely that they'd assign a captain to follow me up and down the Western Hemisphere, so our travel dates could be pure coincidence. Although, it's also possible they scoured the airlines' reservation lists for my name, and when they spotted it, they saw it as an opportunity for a department big cheese to take a pleasant trip at taxpayers' expense while he keeps an eye on me. Or maybe they sincerely believe that I'm at the center of something important."

  Timmy stared at me in amazement over what he obviously saw as my thickheadedness. "But, Don, obviously you are at the center of something important." "Think so? We'll see."

  Timmy just shook his head, then read more from the Post. Timmy told me that Bob Dole, numbers low and stagnant, was still predicting that the public would catch on to the ethically dubious Clintons before election day and virtue-i.e., Dole- would prevail.

  I said, "Let's hope not."

  Timmy said, "Clinton will win, but the voters will punish him for his endless parade of dreary misdemeanors by giving the House and the Senate to the Republicans again."

  "No, people are sick of conflict and divided government. The party will not only retake both houses but Newt will even lose his own congressional seat. He'll abandon Georgia in a fit of pique and move to Absecon, where he'll finish out his career as a southern New Jersey late-night talk-radio host."

  "Sure, and when John Sununu is on vacation, Newt will sub for him on Crossfire, and his liberal antagonist on CNN's hollering contest will be Carmen LoBello doing G. Gordon Liddy Dole."

  "I hope I can track down LoBello soon. He's as likely a candidate as anybody to be the Jim Suter quilt-maker. I'll bet he sews."

  After our Thai dinner the night before with Martin Dormer and Peter Vicknicki, the two ex-Suter boyfriends had accompanied Timmy and me to Starkers, the Fourteenth Street gay club where Carmen LoBello had performed for several years. We located a number of LoBello's acquaintances there, but none had been in touch with him in recent months. And everyone who knew LoBello, including the club manager, described him as all but deranged by his brief affair with Jim Suter.

  Soon after that romantic debacle, LoBello turned into G. Gordon Liddy Dole, a character unwanted by Starkers' customers, or by those in the few other D.C. drag venues where- as Hillary or Nancy or Judy Woodruff-LoBello might have been welcomed. We had struck out at Starkers, but my plan was to try to track LoBello down later that morning at his secretarial job at the Bureau of Mines.

  "The thing I don't get," Timmy said, "is how Carmen LoBello could possibly be connected to Betty Krumfutz."

  I said, "Maybe he isn't. There are connections so far either between or among Suter, Mrs. Krumfutz, Jorge the boyfriend, Alan McChesney, the dead Bryant Ulmer, probably Maynard, and maybe somebody in the D.C. Police Department.

  But so far LoBello is just another enraged Jim Suter dumpee."

  "One of a cast of thousands apparently."

  "There is a possible connection, of a sort, between LoBello and Mrs. Krumfutz.

  Which is, the Betty Krumfutz Maynard believes he saw at the quilt display on Saturday wasn't Mrs. Krumfutz at all. It was Carmen LoBello."

  All in a fraction of a second, Timmy grinned, gasped, and winced. "Oh, good grief!"

  "It makes sense."

  "It does? I guess it could."

  "Betty Krumfutz convincingly denied to me that she was anywhere near the quilt on Saturday. Nor is she, I think, a woman who goes around on a fall afternoon in Washington wearing shades and a trench coat, like some character out of Godard."

  "She might if she wanted to examine the Jim Suter panel for whatever was typed on it about her, and she didn't want to be recognized."

  "This is true. Still, I want to find out where Carmen LoBello was Saturday afternoon. And, if I can, what he was wearing."

  Timmy was looking doubtful again. "But why would LoBello do that? What would he get out of it?"

  "Good question. Maybe LoBello had spotted, or he had been told about, the Suter quilt panel-or he was the one responsible for getting the panel put into the quilt-and he wanted to hurt and embarrass Suter additionally by associating Jim's old employer and ideological cohort with this shocking fraud. Or LoBello could have had other strange reasons. Remember, by all accounts LoBello was driven pretty crazy by the collapse of his affair with Suter."

  Timmy stirred his cappuccino thoughtfully. "I don't really understand that part-I mean, why LoBello was so traumatized by his breakup with Jim Suter that his life all but collapsed. Rejection is painful, yes, but this was not a ten-year relationship that fell apart overnight. It was a fling that had lasted a couple of weeks. No matter how shabbily they may have been treated, people tend to bounce back from disappointments of that limited magnitude. Whether or not he's responsible for the Suter quilt panel, and whether or not he did a Betty Krumfutz drag number at the quilt on Saturday, it's plain that LoBello did not recover normally from his affair with Suter. And I think knowing why would help us understand a lot of what's going on here." "I think you're right, Timothy.

  Assuming, of course, that LoBello has anything at all to do with the quilt, or Mrs.

  Krumfutz, or any of the other awful events that we are currently so preoccupied with. Maybe Carmen LoBello has nothing to do with any of it."

  Timmy grunted and glanced around the cafe. Ray Craig was nowhere in sight, so we assumed someone else from the DCPD was watching over us.

  Trying to pick out our minder had become a mordant game we played whenever we moved around Washington by cab or on the metro, and while we dined out or stopped for our morning coffee or a late-night beer.

  Timmy had even brought up the possibility that our hotel room had been bugged. I considered that far-fetched. I did not go along with Timmy's request that we discuss my investigation and our respective plans only in the hotel bathroom with all the sink and bathtub faucets running loudly. Instead, I suggested that while in our hotel room we hold confidential conversations only when our voices were muffled and our words distorted by our lying on the bed with our pants down or off and with our mouths stuffed with each other's genitalia. Timmy said I wasn't taking our situation seriously enough.

  Chapter 16

  The Bureau of Mines, now an office of the United States Department of the Interior, on C Street, NW, seemed like an unlikely spot for a terrorist attack. But after the Oklahoma City catastrophe, any U.S. government agency had to be considered fair game for ideological mad bombers, so the Interior building was well guarded. I never made it past the uniformed security detail in the lobby, but I was permitted the use of a phone to speak with the department's personnel office-"human resources" in the current puffed-up lingo of big government and big business.

  Carmen LoBello was employed by the Bureau of Mines, I was told, but when I dialed LoBello's extension a woman answered and said Carmen wasn't in. He had taken a "personal day"-not yet labeled a "human needs day"-and he was expected back at work the next day, Wednesday. I'd be en route to the Yucatan then, but now, at any rate, I knew where to find LoBello when
I got back, should I still think I needed to, after I had met with Jim Suter.

  It was midmorning, and Timmy had taken the metro out to National Airport. He was to pick up my passport, carried down from Albany by a USAir flight attendant who was the boyfriend of a colleague of Timmy's at the legislature who had a key to our house. Then Timmy was headed over to GW, where he hoped Maynard would be in good enough shape for his first conversation since the shooting on Saturday night.

  I was to meet two of Jim Suter's friends for lunch-the ones whose names I'd gotten from Bud Hively-with the hope that I might gather information about Suter's whereabouts in Mexico that was more specific than what I had pieced together from Hively and via Timmy's telephone trickery with Betty Krumfutz.

  First, though, I figured I'd drop by Congressman Burton Olds's office and see what I could find out from another Suter ex-lover whose name kept cropping up, former Betty Krumfutz chief of staff Alan McChesney.

  Unlike the Capitol and other nearby government edifices, the Sam Rayburn House Office Building wasn't so much monumental as monstrous. This big gray, graceless heap of marble slabs on Independence Avenue was about as welcoming as a federal penitentiary, and its immense, bleak corridors suggested not democratic representation but crude authority. I made it through the metal detectors and followed a guard's directions up to Congressman Burton Olds's suite of offices on the second floor, where, when I asked for Alan McChesney, the receptionist asked if he was expecting me.

  I said no, but I thought Mr. McChesney would be interested in speaking with me about a missing person. The receptionist, an attractive green-eyed redhead who smelled of frangipani blossoms, spoke briefly on the phone. Then she said to me, "I'm sorry, but Mr. McChesney is with the congressman just now."

  "Which one?"

  "Which congressman is he with?"

  "Right."

  "With Congressman Olds," she said, and gave me an odd look.

  "Do you have any idea how long he'll be in there? I'm sure everybody here is on a tight schedule, but I won't take more than five or ten minutes of Mr.

  McChesney's time."

  "I can leave word that you stopped in, Mr. Strachey, and if you'd like to leave a phone number where we can reach you, we can probably set something up."

  "I guess I'll hang around and hope for the best. If you mention Jim Suter's name, that should speed up the process. Would you mind giving that a try?"

  The woman shifted uncomfortably-was I merely rude or a dangerous loony? and then she got back on the phone. I studied the walls festooned with plaques and citations-from Illinois business and civic groups, from petroleum, chemical, and farm organizations. There were dozens of framed photos, in which Burton Olds, tall, muscular, and pinch-faced, was pictured with a variety of GOP present and former Illinois and national officeholders. Here he was with George and Barbara Bush, over there with Ron and Nancy in palmier days. In other shots Olds posed soberly alongside a grave-faced, bearded man I first thought might be the Reagan surgeon general C. Everett Koop, but who, on closer inspection, turned out to be the mechanical Abraham Lincoln at Disney World.

  Goofy was discernible in the dim background. There were also photos of Olds shaking hands with several foreign leaders, two of them Mexican: former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the current president, Ernesto Zedillo.

  I seated myself and picked up a copy of Time just as a door opened and a beefy, square-faced man appeared. The receptionist indicated to him with a nod that I was the schedule interrupter.

  "I understand you want to talk to Alan McChesney about Jim Suter." His tone wasn't hostile but it was far from friendly.

  "Yes, if I may, please."

  "Alan has a few minutes he can spare you. Follow me. I'm Ian Williamson."

  I sensed that I was expected to know who Williamson was-as in "Hello, I'm Count Leo Tolstoy"-but neither his name nor his face was familiar.

  I followed Williamson through a warren of cubicles and small offices and into a larger office with a window overlooking Independence Avenue and the Capitol grounds. Williamson rapped twice on a polished wooden door, which opened immediately, and a man strode out, quickly and quietly closing the door behind him. He brusquely indicated a straight-backed chair-the petitioner's seat that directly faced the broad, heavy desk that he seated himself behind. Then he said to me coldly, "Is this some kind of shakedown?"

  "Nope."

  "I hope not."

  "I'm a private investigator, not a criminal."

  "I've met people who are both."

  "So have I. But I'm not one of them."

  "Mm-hmm."

  McChesney gazed at me appraisingly while Williamson leaned against the doorframe, his thick arms folded. McChesney was forty-five or so with a chiseled face that was as hard and smooth as polished stone. His trim body had been carefully packaged in a black silk suit, and he wore a necktie with a subtle-hued, kaleidoscopic design that I suspected might reflect his personality as well as his politics.

  "What makes you think I might have criminal designs?" I asked. "Have I got that reputation around the United States Capitol?"

  "No," McChesney said, "you have no reputation whatever around the United States Capitol. But Jim Suter's name means trouble, and you bullied your way in here using Suter's name as an implied threat. I'd like to know what you meant by that. I haven't got much time to spare, so let's have it."

  "I'm trying to locate Suter. I'm a private investigator, and a client, whose name I can't divulge, wants to contact Suter. It's rumored that he's in Mexico, and since you're reported to have introduced Jim to his current boyfriend, your friend Jorge Ramos, I thought you might know where the two of them are."

  McChesney quickly shook his head and said, "You should go into politics, Strachey. 'It is rumored… you are reported… " You spew out this squid's-ink cloud of innuendo, and I'm supposed to tremble and gulp and confess all. Do you really think I'm that easy?"

  "I hoped you might be."

  "You're from-where?"

  "Albany, New York."

  "That's a grown-up political town. You should know better."

  "Let's try this another way, then, that doesn't insult your intelligence, McChesney. You mentioned that Jim Suter's name means trouble. Which trouble did you have in mind?"

  "Jim Suter is a sadist," McChesney said without hesitation. "He tortures men emotionally by seducing and abandoning them. He did it to me and hundreds of others, and if you meet him, he'll more than likely do it to you. I don't know if you're straight or gay, but either way he'll charm the pants off you-figuratively if you're heterosexual, literally if you're homosexual. Then, when you're hooked and you will be, you will be- he'll turn his back on you and never take you seriously again, or ever speak to you again if he can get away with it. Jim is like some Christian-right caricature of a sick, cold-blooded, compulsively promiscuous American homosexual man. And if that's not trouble by any definition, I don't know what is."

  Williamson, still leaning on the doorframe with his arms folded, looked a little sickened by McChesney's description of Suter, which left no room for sympathy for Suter's current alleged plight-which, in any case, I was still honor-bound not to mention.

  I said, "I am gay, and I stand forewarned-by you and by others. But if Suter is so reprehensible, McChesney, how come you introduced him to your friend Jorge Ramos? That doesn't sound very nice."

  "No, it wasn't nice," McChesney said icily. "Nor was it meant to be nice. I'll spare you the sordid details, but please take my word for it that Jorge Ramos and Jim Suter deserve each other. Getting them together wasn't as horrible a revenge as I've sometimes fantasized about for Jim. But for the time being it will have to do.

  Jorge and I, I should add, are no longer friends. I cut all my ties with Jorge months ago, when I discovered exactly what he was."

  "Which was what?"

  McChesney just looked at me.

  "Was Jorge also an emotional sadist of some kind?"

  "You could put it t
hat way," McChesney said, and then his mouth clamped shut.

  "Is it true that Suter is Mexico?"

  "I wouldn't know because I haven't seen or been in touch with Jim Suter in months-a good year probably. But if Jorge got him. down to Cancun and got his hooks in him, Jim may well have stayed. Even if after three days he and Jorge had had enough of each other, romantically speaking."

  "What kind of hooks does Jorge have that he gets into people?"

  "He's a hustler and a scam artist. Most of it's quasi-legitimate, but I suspect a lot of it's not-oversold vacation-condo time-share operations and the like. Drugs?

  Probably, once in a while, if a deal is foolproof. It's where the big easy money is made in Mexico. Every year forty billion dollars' worth of recreational narcotics passes through Mexico from South America to North America's fun-loving addicts and glamour seekers. And over half that forty billion ends up in the bank accounts of Mexican dealers and officials they've bought off. Jorge would not be one to let such an opportunity pass by, however cautiously he might go about it. He's always got money and easy access to the best of the good life on the Mexican Caribbean coast, and Jim Suter would go for that, I have reason to believe. Jim never made much as a writer, I don't think, so Jorge's lifestyle and circle of friends would be a definite draw for Jim-as it has been for so many men."

  "Yourself included?"

  McChesney didn't flinch at the insult. He just smiled a little sadly and said, "No, I was interested in Jorge's ass, not his expensive tastes."

  "And he was interested in yours?"

  "For a while, yes. Then his interests shifted and things got a little rough between us. Before I broke things off."

  "Care to elaborate on that?"

  "To you? No."

  Williamson stood shaking his head with distaste, as if he knew the McChesney-Jorge story, and he, too, found it too ugly to contemplate out loud.

  I asked McChesney, "Where did you meet Jorge?" "In Cancun." "On vacation?"