Strachey's folly ds-7

by Richard Stevenson

  "That's what I am inclined to think has happened to May-nard Sudbury. He was the victim of a few people doing the wrong thing in concert with one another, probably in order to make a fast buck. But a monstrous mass conspiracy?

  Something 'bigger than you are, Strachey,' as you guys so melodramatically put it? I don't think so. My question about all those people I listed is not how are they all interrelated? It's which one put Jim Suter's name in the AIDS quilt, and who's the asshole who had Maynard Sudbury shot?"

  Heckinger and Sweet regarded me dully throughout this second oration of the early afternoon. When I had wound down, Heckinger sipped from his wineglass and said, "You're awfully old-fashioned, aren't you, Strachey?"

  "Old-fashioned? I don't hear that one often. Can I get a signed affidavit to that effect to show to my boyfriend?"

  Sweet shot me the hairy eyeball and snarled, "I'll give you an affidavit to think about!"

  Then the waitress was back. "You gentlemen ready to order? Or do you need a few more minutes?"

  "I'll have the ham club on wheat toast. This one," I said, indicating Sweet, "would probably enjoy the thumbtack salad with croutons of gypsum and a tapenade of ground glass."

  The waitress chortled, then glanced at Sweet and saw the look on his face. She said, "If you'd like a little more time to think it over, I'll come back in a few minutes. Take your time." Instantly, she was gone again.

  Ignoring Sweet, I looked at Heckinger and said, "So, how about spitting it out?

  You're a friend of Jim's-that I know-and you say he doesn't want to talk to me.

  Why?"

  "Because if he talks to anyone," Heckinger said mildly, "he may be killed."

  "Please explain that."

  "I can't."

  "Why?"

  "I can't tell you that."

  "But he talked to you, and you're alive."

  Heckinger and Sweet glanced at each other and shared a moment of amusement over this. "Yes, we are alive," Heckinger said. "Indeed we are."

  "Why are you threatening me?" I said. "Are you with the people who are threatening Suter? Is that what you do? Is the consortium of interests you say you represent an organization that, as part of its normal operating procedures, routinely threatens people?"

  Heckinger said mildly, "That pretty much describes it."

  So what were they then? They came across as a couple of unemployed bad actors, hired down at the union hall for an afternoon of impersonating thugs.

  But since actual thugs, more than they used to, pick up their styles and techniques from popcorn movies and TV series, maybe these two were authentic- what? Mobsters? CIA? KGB? Agents of the National Realtors Association?

  I said, "Whoever you are, there is one question you can answer for me without violating your instructions. Give me this much. Is Jim, in fact, in Mexico?"

  "He is, actually," Heckinger said.

  "Where?"

  He looked at me levelly. "I've told you all I can tell you, Strachey, and that is all the farther I can go. Don't go down there. That is Jim's wish and that is his instruction to you. If you get near him, you could get him killed. Now, there is potential folly for you, some human anger and confusion, and a resulting distinct evil."

  All the farther I can go? This, I knew, was a Pennsylvania Dutch construction German actually-meaning "as far as I can go." I hadn't heard it since my college affair at Rutgers with Kenny Womeldorf, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

  Kenny occasionally carne out with these peculiar locutions that the Amish and German Mennonites had, over the years, deposited in the otherwise Mid-Atlantic Standard English of rural and small-town southeastern and Central Pennsylvania.

  I took a leap and said, "Look, let's quit playing games here. You seem to know a lot about me and my current activities, and the fact is, I know a lot about the two of you. I know, for example, that despite your amateurish goonish threats, you work for neither the CIA nor the Mafia. You work for one or both of the Krumfutzes."

  Heckinger and Sweet both got very busy now not reacting at all. "Oh, you know that?" Heckinger said tightly. Heckinger's face was red and Sweet's was white.

  "Uh-huh."

  "Well, I do believe you have been misinformed."

  "Nope."

  They stared at me.

  "Moreover, additional disturbing information I have obtained concerning you and your colleagues up in the Keystone State has been handed over to reliable outside individuals. And if anything bad happens to Jim Suter or to me or to Timothy Callahan, or if anything else bad happens to Maynard Sudbury, that information will move swiftly to (a) the Washington Post and (b) the U.S. attorney's offices in both Philadelphia and Washington."

  Heckinger and Sweet both sat stone-faced and silent. Just then the waitress showed up and made another tentative foray. "Ready now?"

  Heckinger gestured to Sweet, and the two of them stood up abruptly and walked out of the restaurant. I made a mental note to bill them later for the wine and the Sam Adams.

  After lunch, I found a pay phone in the hotel lobby and tracked down Chondelle Dolan again.

  "I had a quick look," she told me, "at the case file on the Bryant Ulmer homicide.

  On the night the crime occurred last January the eighth, it did look to be a robbery. Ulmer's expensive watch was taken, and his wallet with cash and credit cards. But there was something a little bit different about this robbery that made the investigating detectives wonder about it. Ulmer was shot six times-a lot for a perpetrator who wants to gather up his loot and start running away with it. And the gun that killed Ulmer wasn't an MP-25 or some other piece of street junk. Ulmer was killed with a Cobray M-ll. This is a mean nine-millimeter firearm that's rare among everyday street thugs in Washington. Only the serious drug professionals carry M-lls-usually just to terrorize people they want to keep in line. And you know what else, Strachey?"

  "What else?"

  "I checked Ray's case file on the shooting of Maynard Sudbury. Your pal Maynard was shot with the same type of weapon."

  "Does Ray know this? Is he having forensic comparisons done on the bullets in the two shootings?"

  "If he is, there's nothing in his file on it."

  "I wonder why."

  "Me, too."

  Chapter 19

  In the icy depths of an abnormally frigid Northeastern winter in the mid-1980s, Timmy and I had fled Albany for the tropics and ended up spending ten mostly happy days exploring Mayan ruins on the Yucatan peninsula. We observed the cliche of tourism in Mexico and got sick. But that hadn't lasted, and as refugees from the glaciated Hudson valley, we found the Yucatan heat and dust as therapeutic as the sober hospitality of the Yu-catecan people.

  Now I was on a plane on my way back. I was eager to revisit the big, flat limestone shelf that had been home to a pre-Columbian civilization that worshiped a rain god, ripped the hearts out of its enemies, excelled in stone architecture and astronomy, and understood the concept of zero when the Europeans, apparently working backward from ninety-nine, were still stuck at about six. The Yucatecan Caribbean coast had only in recent years been developed, and it lacked the charm of the inland colonial-era population centers such as Merida and Valladolid. But except for Canciin, a teeming monument to soulless industrial tourism, the coastal strip down to Tulum was still relatively un-Hyattized, I'd been told. And most of the beaches were so pure and sparsely trod upon that it was possible to imagine this turquoise coast as wild-eyed Cortes had first viewed it in 1519- I hoped my visit would be more congenial than his had been, and briefer.

  I had in my possession on the flight from National to Miami, and then on to Cancun, directions to Los Pajaros, the small town where Betty Krumfutz had told Timmy that Jim Suter was living with his boyfriend Jorge. I also had a photo of Suter that Peter Vicknicki had provided, and a bathing suit, T-shirts, and sandals I'd picked up at a mall near the airport. Otherwise, I was traveling lighter than light.

  The information from Betty Krumfutz was now suspect, of course.
Why would she tell anyone where Jim Suter might be found if her thuggish employees Heckinger and Sweet (assuming they were Mrs. Krumfutz's agents) adamantly refused to do so? So I was as uncertain as ever what to expect in Los Pajaros, which in Spanish meant "the birds."

  I wondered if, avianly speaking, I was in for some Audubon or Aristophanes or Hitchcock. I hoped it was Audubon. I knew Los Pajaros existed-I'd found it on the Yucatan road map I'd brought along-but I did not know if, when I arrived there, anyone would have heard of Jim Suter or Jorge Ramos. Before flying out early Wednesday morning, I asked Timmy to do some digging while I was gone on Heckinger and Sweet and to learn, if he could, from Maynard or Bud Hively or from Vicknicki and Dormer, who these two characters were, what they did for a living, and who they did it for. Timmy also planned on contacting Carmen LoBello at the Bureau of Mines and feeling him out on the quilt panel and the panel vandalism.

  As the American Airlines 737 bumped across the top of some Gulf of Mexico fall thunderstorms, I got out the photo of Suter and studied his face. It was not hard to memorize. As had been widely attested to, Suter was a looker. In the head-and-shirtless-torso shot Vicknicki had lent me, Suter was muscular and trim in an appealingly natural way-both gym-slave obses-siveness and pectoral implants seemed unlikely-and he had a subtly sculpted Botticelli face topped with the notorious golden curls.

  Maynard had referred to Suter's looks as those of a sensual Harpo Marx, and while I saw in his face the logic of the comparison-the gold, the glow, the obvious capacity for worldly delight-there was nothing shy about Suter's look, and no hint that, like Harpo, Suter might choose to express himself chiefly with a musical instrument or by honking a horn. Suter's gaze was direct and inviting, and in the photo his mouth was open slightly, as if he were about to tell you something you very much wanted to hear. What I wanted Suter to tell me was the truth, but I could not read in this single photograph whether I was likely to hear it from him or not.

  The Yucatan's summer-fall rain-and-occasional-hurricane season was largely spent by mid-October, and as the plane came in low over the resort island of Isla Mujeres, the early-afternoon, mile-high, billowing clouds had spread apart and the sun was streaming through. This was off-season for tourism in the Yucatan, and the plane was less than half-filled. As the sixty or eighty passengers filed off at Cancun airport, I tried to spot Milton Kingsley, the D.C. police captain Chondelle said was traveling to Cancun around the same time I was.

  I saw no one fitting Chondelle's description of Kingsley- "George Foreman underneath a toupee that looks like a sleeping hamster"-and if Ray Craig had anyone else tailing me, there was no way of my knowing who on the flight it could have been. I half expected to detect Craig's scent in the airport, but had he been there, his odor would have been masked by the tobacco smoke in the poorly ventilated building, which could have been doubling as an air terminal and a Government of Mexico Ministry of Health emphysema research project.

  I bought five hundred dollars' worth of the depressed local currency-NAFTA, a net plus for Mexican business, had not saved the peso from one of its periodic bungee jumps (the cord being the U.S. Treasury)-and stuffed the wad in my pocket. I picked up the rental car I'd reserved, a GM maquiladora assembly-plant product called, I think, a Chevy Outtie, and turned south. Making my way through the unmarked, chaotic road-construction area below the airport-driving in Mexico, as in Italy, Nigeria, and Boston, was not for the faint of heart-I headed down the Caribbean coast.

  The air was heavy and hot, and my heart swelled with pleasure over being back in the tropics. Before I'd met Timmy in untropical Albany, two of my best love affairs had been with men in cities well south of the tropic of Cancer. The first was with sweet and exuberant Mike Akenjemi in Lagos, during a summer work-study program after my junior year at Rutgers. Two years later it was Ted Metzger, in that period when my government announced that it needed me and I concluded that two dangerous years in Saigon were preferable to any kind of a lifetime in Winnipeg.

  I later heard from a decent and conscience-stricken friend who went there that summers on the Canadian plains were fiercely hot, too. But for me a hot climate was not a cultural advantage, just a circumstance under which I had twice somehow found romance and sweaty erotic joy.

  None of that was about to be repeated, I was sure. For Jim Suter, despite his famous physical allure, sounded to me like a deeply problematical piece of work.

  Also, I had long since ceased sexual meandering, much to Timmy's relief. Both of our rare ex-tramonogamous erotic adventures consisted of two-or-three-times-a-year, joint visits to far-from-home gay bathhouses-in Paris, Amsterdam, San Francisco-for some no-exchange-of-fluids, happy carnal comingling with others that was as harmful as a couple of farm boys in 1927 attending the hootchie-kootchie show at the Nebraska state agricultural fair, and far more wholesome.

  Those excursions pretty much satisfied the urges in both of us for sexual variety.

  So, the Yucatecan jungle heat notwithstanding, I expected that in the department of erotic temptation, my meeting with the allegedly irresistible Jim Suter would be- in the words of a droll Mexican I'd once met who liked to imitate the speech of gringo touristsnoproblemo.

  About halfway between Playa del Carmen and Tulum, just north of the resort complex at Akumal, I saw the road sign for Los Pa-jaros. It directed me off Route 307, the two-lane blacktop that ran the length of the coast from Cancun down to Chetumal on the border with Belize.

  A third of a mile off the highway, behind a strip of jungle thicket, Los Pajaros consisted of an assortment of perhaps a hundred small houses along a scraggly network of muddy streets. Most of the houses were cement, but there were a couple of traditional Mayan palapas, too, made of sticks and palmetto thatch, and it w/as the palapas that looked the most inviting in the midafternoon wet heat.

  Few people were out and about, just some kids kicking a soccer ball around the grassy town square and a woman in a white Mayan huipil toting what I guessed was a bucket of cornmeal down the main street. A cow was tethered under a shady scrub oak in front of one house, and a skinny dog that looked as if it might have been the source of the term hangdog expression sniffed at some trash in a front yard.

  The few remaining older towns on the coast had Mayan name-Muchi, Pamul, Chemuyil-and I figured that the newer Los Pajaros had been built to house workers at the same time the nearby beachfront resorts went up. The central plaza had nothing identifiable as a Catholic church, just a one-story community center with a ramshackle arcade and some faded endorsements by the PRI, the forever-dominant Mexican political party, of former presidents who now were dead, fled, or under indictment somewhere.

  Away from the highway, the only sounds in Los Pajaros were of the soccer-playing kids exclaiming in an unfamiliar language I took to be Mayan, and the recorded hymns, in Spanish, coming out of the front of the Seventh-Day Adventist meetinghouse. I recognized "Onward, Christian Soldiers," although on this torpid Wednesday afternoon no one in Los Pajaros was marching as to anything.

  I had a hard time envisioning the scintillating Jim Suter in this place and wondered if maybe Timmy hadn't been misinformed by a wily Betty Krumfutz. I found a small tienda that was open, and using my combination of phrase-book and hazily remembered high school Spanish, I asked the elderly proprietress where I might find the norteamericano Jim Suter. "Laplaya," the old woman replied.

  I asked her if she was acquainted with Senor Suter, and she gestured vaguely in an easterly direction and repeated, "En la playa." I took this to mean that she did not know Suter personally but that all the North Americans in Los Pajaros lived over by the beach and not here in the village. She explained to me where to find the beach road. I bought a two-liter bottle of aguapu-rificada and swigged from it as I drove another mile down the main highway and then turned onto a road marked by a small sign that read Playa.

  So as not to damage my Outtie's tender underbelly, I drove slowly and carefully down a potholed muddy road with thick, low jungle on either side
of it for half a mile. Then the thicket ended and the road swung sharply left and ran parallel to the beach. The first house I came to was a big, two-story, L-shaped, white stucco job, between me and the sea, with terraces on either side of it, a terra-cotta-tile roof, and lots of big, louvered windows thrown open. A small satellite dish pointed skyward from the roof, although I saw no electrical lines and I wondered what the house's power source was.

  A chest-high stucco wall crawling with vermilion bougainvil-lea wound around the house on three sides. It was interrupted by a gravel driveway that led up to a two-car garage and a smaller outbuilding. The only vehicle visible was a blue Chevy Suburban with muddy fenders. From my vantage point, some flowering trees obscured the front door, so I pulled my tiny Chevy up alongside the big one and climbed out into the bright heat. As I shut the car door, a couple of grass-green parrots shot out of the flame tree next to the garage and careened into the jungle squawking. So here were some actual pajaros.

  Then the afternoon air was quiet again except for the sound of the light surf beyond the house. Off to my left the beach road continued on northward with other similar large, nicely designed stucco houses along it every twenty-five yards or so. I meant to ask at this house where Jim Suter was staying. But that wasn't necessary, for when I walked around the trees and approached the front door, it was already open and a man in cream-colored running shorts and a powder-blue tank top was standing just inside the doorframe grinning out at me.

  "Don Strachey?"

  "I am he."

  "God, where have you been all my life?"

  "That's an awfully tired line, Suter."

  "It sounds as fresh to me as it did the first time I uttered it more than twenty years ago. It must be you who's jaded, Strachey. "

  "Not jaded, just well informed-about you and your habit of seducing and abandoning men."

  "Oh, and you're too frail for that?"

  "Not frail, just not interested." He was radiant, and now I saw why otherwise rational men had lost their senses in Suter's presence. Trying hard to keep my voice steady, I said, "Anyway, we've got more urgent matters to discuss, no?"