Strachey's folly ds-7

by Richard Stevenson

  Timmy was shifting from foot to foot. Not only had he to put up with Craig, he had also to endure my joshing on the subject of his dearest friends, the ex-Peace Corps mob. But he knew when to keep his mouth shut, and now was one of those times.

  Craig said, "I hope for your sake that what you're telling me about Maynard Sudbury is the truth, Strachey. If it's not, you'll have me to answer to. What did you find out from Jim Suter?"

  "You still haven't explained," I said, "why you think I went to Mexico to see someone you keep referring to as Jim Suter."

  "Skip the bullshit game-playing. If you knew your ass from your left nut, you'd know that I've talked to Suter's mother and to six other people, most of them admitted homosexuals, that you've interviewed about Suter. What's Suter's connection to Sudbury? Is Suter Sudbury's drug connection in the Yucatan?"

  "No, Ray. Suter and Sudbury were once boyfriends, and I'm talking to all of Maynard's ex-lovers trying to develop a lead on the shooting. You're hung up on this drug thing, and that's a nonstarter. In order to see that Timothy's and my friend's attacker is brought to justice, I'm simply doing your job the way it ought to be done. Instead of ragging me and having me followed everywhere I go, you ought to be cooperative. Grateful even."

  At that, Craig spat a wad of tobacco-y phlegm at my feet and said, "What a bullshitter you are."

  I said, "Tell me about Suter's lawsuit."

  "His what?"

  "Somebody is suing him, he says. Suter convinced me he knows nothing about the Sudbury shooting. But he said there's a lawsuit against him here in D.C., and the cops are involved in it somehow. What's that about?"

  Craig said, "It's chilly out here. Let's go up to your room. We can sit down where it's comfortable, maybe throw back a couple of brews, and have an exchange of information."

  Timmy said, "It's getting late. What about tomorrow? Could you have your exchange of information tomorrow?"

  "Let's have an exchange of information here and now," I said. "Why wait? Ray, why don't you light up a butt and relax? Timmy, if you want to take a load off your feet, you go on up. But I'm going to tell Ray right now that Jim Suter has two connections to Maynard, and both, I discovered, apparently have nothing to do with the shooting.

  "One connection is, many years ago Suter and Sudbury were lovers for a short time. The other connection is, a panel with Suter's name on it appeared in the AIDS quilt on Saturday, and Maynard recognized this and notified the Names Project of this strange occurrence the day he was shot. The Names Project is where I plan to concentrate my investigation next, Ray. And if you were smarter than I'm afraid you might be, that's where you'd start asking questions, too."

  Craig was sucking in the carbon monoxide, etc., from a Camel Light now, probably reducing the chances that in the throes of withdrawal he would suddenly yank out a service revolver and slam hot lead into our chests. I hated to sic him onto the Names Project-these people deserved better-but I needed time to check out Suter's wild tale of drug gangs in Central Pennsylvania and then to talk him into the Witness Protection Program and save him from his lover-jailer Jorge and the Mexican drug cartel killers.

  Craig said calmly, "I already am in touch with the AIDS quilt organization." "Hey, good."

  "They faxed me a copy of the form that came in with Suter's panel. The panel was submitted in April by a David Phipps, but the name seems to be phony. He used a Mailboxes, Etcetera drop, and now I gotta get a fucking court order to find out who rented the box. I'm working on it. Am I conducting my investigation to your satisfaction, Strachey?"

  "Nice work, Ray. Now tell me this. Who is Captain Milton Kingsley, and why did he follow me to Cancun? I know that a couple of your junior officers have been tailing me around D.C. since Sunday morning. But am I such a criminal celebrity in your department that I merit a captain to keep tabs on me?"

  In middrag, Craig went very still. "You spotted Kingsley? Tailing you? In Mexico?"

  There was no way I could have blabbed to Craig that a pal of Chondelle's in the department had been the source of Captain Kingsley's travel plans. "I spotted him, yeah."

  "How do you know Kingsley?" Craig said grimly. "How did you recognize him?"

  "Suter recognized him. He knew him from a piece he once wrote for Washingtonian magazine."

  Craig dragged deeply on his cigarette and said nothing more.

  I asked him, "What about the lawsuit? Suter wouldn't tell me what that was about. He seemed embarrassed by whatever it was."

  Craig still stood looking pensive, disturbed even, apparently over my report that I had spotted Milton Kingsley in Cancun. Finally Craig said, "I ran Suter's name. It came up once. He was charged with assault last year. The judge threw out the assault charge. But the court record says the victim told the judge that he planned on pursuing a civil action. I've got somebody checking to find out if that was done."

  "Who brought the charge, and what was the nature of the assault?"

  "The alleged victim was a Carmen LoBello. LoBello is a man who used to do a drag act, pretending to be Mrs. Liddy Dole. The so-called assault was this: Suter gave LoBello herpes, LoBello claims, and now LoBello's got a big cold sore on his upper lip half the time. LoBello can only do G. Gordon Liddy Dole, with a big mustache that covers up the cold sore. Except, nobody wants to go see a drag act with somebody called G. Gordon Liddy Dole. So LoBello is up shit creek. You queers sure pick up some interesting ways to get yourself in trouble,"

  Craig said, and I had to agree with that.

  Chapter 23

  Of course I'm going to sue that evil man!" LoBello spat out. "Because of Jim Suter my career is in ruins! Until I kissed Jim Suter, I was a star! God, I was fabulous. I did Hillary to a tee, my Jamie Gorelick was dead-on, and I had Dianne Feinstein nailed, and Barbara Bush and Maxine Waters, and- God, can you imagine what the demand would be for my smarmy-marmy Liddy Dole now that that nine-faced Southern bitch is all over the tube, doing her white-bread Oprah routine at the Republican convention! I'd be doing Liddy on Jay, on Let-terman, on Nightline. Instead, I'm still pushing mine-acid reports around, and it's all because of that lying, manipulative, vicious, evil rodent Jim Suter. Oh, I'm suing him, all right. I'll sue his ass from Dupont Circle to the Supreme Court!

  When I catch up with Mr. Pretty-head-herpes-mouth Jim Suter, just you watch the subpoenas fly!"

  The three of us were seated around a small outside table at the cafe with the excellent croissants on Second Street, SE. The early-morning Capitol Hill before-work crowd had been arriving for some time, and those seated closest to us must have been having trouble concentrating on their Posts and Timeses and lattes. LoBello was a strikingly attractive man, with the womanly-as opposed to effeminate-manner of the best drag queens. He had longish, swept-back, perfectly groomed dark hair in the style of an Italian maestro, and a fine-boned face that could have been out of La Dolce Vita except for the spectacularly large cold sore that took up about a quarter of his nicely shaped upper lip. The mustache LoBello had grown for his G. Gordon Liddy Dole act, and to cover up the sore, was gone now, as was the fat cigar.

  Timmy had set up the meeting with LoBello while I was in Mexico. We had known that LoBello was a disgruntled former boyfriend of Suter's who, we figured, might have quilt-panel sewing ability. This was before Suter theorized to me that the panel had in fact been a warning to him from the drug gang, but also before Ray Craig had come up with the news that LoBello had once charged Suter with assault-assault to the upper lip with an ugly virus.

  I said to LoBello, "I guess you don't know where Jim Suter is. Otherwise you would have launched your suit against him." "I haven't got a clue where Jim is.

  Wherever he is, I'm sure the place has turned into Chernobyl just from his presence. I could probably just keep my eyes peeled for emotional mushroom clouds rising. Meanwhile, I was thinking of hiring a private detective to locate the elusive Jimmy. And Timothy tells me you're a dick. Since you're looking for him anyway, perhaps you would do me the kindness when
you locate Jim to give me or my attorney a jingle. You can bill me for whatever you want- up to twenty dollars, if you don't mind." "Okay."

  "I've done everything I could think of to smoke Suter out. But he's gone. His phone's disconnected, and I've waited outside his building dozens of times, sometimes for hours, just sitting on the curb nursing my rage. But he never goes in and he never goes out. It's hard to imagine that Jim Suter could stay away from Washington for long. This town is where he's a star-a big, big star.

  Jim's the Jane Fonda-I used to do her, too, by the way-he's the Jane Fonda of backroom, right-wing-political Washington, is what he is-as Jim will be the first to let you know."

  "Suter may be a star," Timmy said, "but he seems not to be a well-loved star."

  "No, Mary Tillotson, Jimmy is not." LoBello dabbed at the filmy latte mustache that didn't begin to camouflage his large cold sore. "There's a good chance, of course, that he's here in town and he's hiding out. There are probably dozens of Washington men looking for his ass so they can take legal action. Either on grounds of mental cruelty-which won't get them far in one of the local homophobic courts of law-or for passing his hideous herpes around, as in my unhappy case. My attorney has advised me that anybody whose livelihood is dependent on their physical appearance-and let's face it, whose isn't? — could make an airtight legal case against any person who ruined that physical appearance. Legally, it's disfigurement."

  "You're still quite lovely, Carmen," I said sincerely.

  "Thanks, but I'll never be Liddy Dole again. Do you think Liddy Dole would leave her apartment looking like this? Oh, no. 'No. Thanks,' the great lady of the Red Cross would say, 'but no thanks.' I mean, did Clara Barton have herpes? I don't believe so."

  "Don't cold sores tend to come and go?" Timmy said. "I know people with herpes of that type, and they'll sometimes go for months without a sore breaking out."

  LoBello gave Timmy a duh look and said, "Timothy, honey, do you know what makes cold sores break out?"

  "I've heard fatigue can do it. And of course stress."

  LoBello grimaced theatrically and said, "Say no more. Also, it's not just that Suter gave me herpes. It's that, like everything else, he lied about the sore on his lip when we went to bed. He said it was just some dumb zit. I told him, 'Honey, you better stay away from those candy bars.' Later, when I broke out with this grotesque thing on my lip, and I caught up with Jim and made him admit to the truth, he not only confessed. He admitted to me that he himself had picked up the viais from rimming some closeted right-wing queen on Jesse Helms's staff who had anal herpes. God, if I ever run into Helms, I'd love to plant a big, wet one on that ugly kisser of his."

  Timmy was staring at my mouth. I said, "I can appreciate, Carmen, why you might be upset about this."

  "Upset? That hardly describes how I feel about James Suter."

  "And I can see why you're determined to track Jim down."

  "My latest tactic," LoBello said, leaning closer to me and lowering his voice, "has been trying to smoke Jim out by using what I have to admit is a kind of tasteless stunt." He glanced quickly around the cafe and, his face flushed, said, "I know you know about a panel in the AIDS quilt with Jim's name on it, even though as far as I know he's not dead. He doesn't even have AIDS or HIV."

  "We're aware of the quilt panel," I said.

  "I know you are. I saw you looking at it on Saturday."

  "Uh-huh."

  "Well-I did it. I made and submitted the quilt panel in memory of Mr. Suter."

  LoBello grinned nervously and fluttered his eyelashes.

  "You did this to smoke Jim out?"

  "Yes, and it's been all over the media. I thought, if I can't find Jim, maybe the press can. Although they haven't so far apparently. Anyway, I knew he'd hear about it, and it was a way of telling Jim exactly what I thought of him. I'm sure he knows who did it."

  I said, "Why is that, Carmen?"

  "Because I took one of his old manuscripts out of his apartment the last time I was in it, and I kept it, and in May I sewed pages from the manuscript into the quilt panel. I took the manuscript in the first place because I thought there was some dirt in it that I could use against Jim, though it turned out there wasn't. It was just his Betty Krumfutz campaign biography-a piece of cheap political hackery. But I stuck it on the quilt panel to humiliate Jim-and maybe to fuck him up professionally, the way he did me-and to lower him in the eyes of his good pal and onetime employer, that obnoxious right-wing Republican witch, Betty Krumfutz."

  With a feeling that was not yet sinking but was poised to descend, I began to wonder why Suter had told me thirty-six hours earlier that he guessed the quilt panel had been a menacing stunt perpetrated by the drug gang to keep him in line. If he knew LoBello had possession of his Krumfutz campaign-bio manuscript, and Sweet and Heckinger were keeping him up-to-date on Washington developments, he would surely have fingered LoBello, the angry ex-lover with sewing skills who wanted to sue him, as the quilt-panel creep. Yet Suter had apparently lied to me about the quilt panel and what he must have known about it.

  I asked LoBello, "What made you think the Krumfutz manuscript might have had dirt in it that you could use against Jim? What kind of dirt?"

  LoBello smirked, but uneasily. "This is quite intimate. It involves pillow talk between me and Jim. Can you take it?"

  "Mm-hm."

  "Right after Jim and I met," LoBello said, lowering his voice again, "when things were hot and heavy between us, we were in bed sharing a joint one night while I was running my fingers through that gorgeous head of hair of Jimmy's. Jim started to tell me how much our relationship meant to him because it took his mind off something big and important in his life that had been gnawing at him.

  He dumped me two weeks later-the big puddle of puke-but that night I had brought peace to his soul, Jim told me, and I helped him get centered at a time when he needed that more than ever. Jim said he knew things about certain well-known people that would rock Washington and rock the country.

  That's how he put it: 'rock Washington and rock the whole country.'"

  LoBello sipped his latte, dabbed his lips with a napkin, and as Timmy and I watched and listened with mounting interest, he continued, "Naturally, I asked Jim, what's this thing that's so earthshaking? But he wouldn't tell me. Which was unusual. Jim loved dropping names and dishing people on the Hill-who's fucking whom, metaphorically and actually and whatnot. This big thing was a Hill thing, he said, that might have changed the outcome of the '94 congressional elections if it had gotten out.

  "I could tell that Jim was actually quite scared of this big, scandalous whatever it was, and he never brought it up again. But when I suddenly realized one night a couple of weeks later that it — was my turn to get dumped on my ass by Jim Suter, I remembered this conversation, and as I was on my way out, I grabbed the first thing on Jim's desk that looked like some kind of Hill papers, and I stuffed it in my bag. I went over the damn thing with a fine-tooth comb, and all it was, was the stupid campaign-bio manuscript. What a waste of time, and what a bore. But I kept the thing, even after Jim called all irritated and indignant and demanded that I mail it back to him, and then in May I sewed a chunk of the stupid thing on the quilt panel. So I got to use it to stick Jim and give the knife a twist after all."

  I said, "When did this conversation about the scandalous situation take place?"

  "In January of this year. Around the tenth or twelfth, it would have been. On the twenty-seventh I became another of Jim's ex-lover nonpersons. I guess you've heard about that category. There are hundreds of us. Thousands maybe."

  "Did Jim give you any idea of when the shocking event, or events, actually took place?" I asked.

  "Not really. Only that it was on his mind at the time, and he said he'd be lucky if he didn't come out of this one with an ulcer."

  "You said, Carmen, that you were sharing a joint when this thing came up. Is it possible that drugs were involved in the scandalous circumstances? And that your smo
king marijuana somehow triggered Jim's discussion of this large matter that was eating at him?"

  LoBello gave me a don't-be-ridiculous look. "Honey, we shared a joint just about every night. Both before and after we made love. And making love with Jim Suter is about as good as making sweet love gets. You can take my word for that and put it in the bank. It's just too bad Jim was also a liar, an emotional sadist, and a morally empty shell. Except for those, he was the best. But he was all of the above, and worse. And for doing what he did to me, Miss LoBello regrets to say, Mr. Suter is going to have to pay. He's going to have to pay very dearly."

  I said, "Carmen, among the Washington power-women you impersonated in your drag act-and impersonated quite brilliantly, by all accounts-was one of them Betty Krumfutz?"

  LoBello affected a poker face and said, "Oh, yes. I did Betty." He was both trying hard not to grin and obviously enjoying letting us know that he was trying hard not to grin.

  "And did you reprise your Betty Krumfutz routine Saturday afternoon at the AIDS quilt display? Maybe to draw extra attention to the Suter quilt panel you sewed and submitted to the Names Project in order to embarrass Jim among his Capitol Hill friends, acquaintances, and colleagues?"

  LoBello beamed. "Am I good, or am I good?"

  Timmy and I looked at each other. I thought, yes, LoBello is an accomplished actor-as is Jim Suter.

  Chapter 24

  I needed to speak with Betty Krumfutz fast. I called her office at the Glenn Beale Foundation and was told that she had left Washington Thursday night for Log Heaven and would not be back in her office until Monday morning. I could have phoned her in Pennsylvania, but a face-to-face meeting was what I wanted. I needed to question her in depth, if I could, on whatever it was that she had on her husband, Nelson, that would put him away "for the rest of his life," as she had worded it to me during my visit to Log Heaven, but which she had held back at his trial.