Death trick ds-1

by Richard Stevenson

“Good. Stay with your friend until I’ve been in touch again, okay? You could be in danger if you’re anywhere near that house, so will you stay away from the house until you’ve checked with me?”

  “Yes, but-who’s doing this?”

  “I don’t know. I think I know, but I’m not sure. When I know for sure, I’ll tell you. And I’ll let you know about Sunday.”

  “You can reach me at the office on Friday.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  It was the goddamn phone book. Bowman should have confiscated it. I should have taken it from Blount’s apartment before some lunatic with a lethal contempt for Billy Blount’s friends had gotten hold of it and used the listings-by-number directory to locate Chris, Mark, Huey, and-Zimka? He hadn’t been bothered. I guessed I knew why.

  I reached Huey Brownlee at his work number. “Huey, Don Strachey. Would you mind moving into my apartment for a couple of days?”

  “Heh, heh.”

  “No, I won’t be there. Sorry to say. It’s all those phone calls you were getting-have you gotten any more?”

  “Yeah, three last night. I was gonna call you. Fuckin’ motherfucker. I’m just waitin’ for him to show up, Donald.”

  “Huey, if you don’t get out of there, you could be in for some trouble from a very dangerous screwball, the man who killed Steve Kleckner. Will you do it?”

  “Say, you ain’t shittin’ me, Don?”

  “I am not,” I said, and he reluctantly agreed to move over to Morton Avenue. I gave him the address, told him where to find the key, and said I’d see him on the weekend.

  I phoned Mark Deslonde at Sears. “Mark-Don Strachey, I have a funny question that isn’t really funny. Have you gotten any weird phone calls in the last few days?”

  “No, have you?”

  “You haven’t?”

  “No, but I haven’t been home. I moved in with Phil-Saturday night.”

  Another peripatetic gay male. The killer must have been having one hell of a time locating a victim at home in his own bed. I said, “Oh. It’s that serious with you and Phil?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well-I approve. Entirely.”

  “Entirely?”

  I said, “Well, you know. But yes.”

  He said, “I know.”

  “Are you going to Trucky’s tonight? I’ll see you.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  We’ll. “Great. Us too. Look, do something for me. Whatever happens with you and Phil-and I do wish you all the best-whatever happens-I mean even if one of you has an attack of second thoughts or whatever-do not move back into your apartment until you check with me.

  Will you do that?”

  “Sure. I guess so. But why?”

  “It has to do with the Kleckner killing. There’s nothing to worry about if you just stay away from the apartment with your phone in it. Look, I’ll explain it all in a few days. Will you just do what I say?”

  Deslonde told me he would do what I said, although, as it happened, he did not.

  I made coffee on my hot plate. I thought about going out for cigarettes. I went back to my desk. I looked up Frank Zimka’s number and stared at it. I thought about calling him, but I concluded that I’d probably be tipping him off, so I didn’t call. Instead I slit open the envelope Zimka had given me for Billy Blount.

  The letter was handwritten on old, yellowing, three-ring notebook paper.

  My Dear loving friend Billy,

  I don’t know where to get in touch with you, but the guy who is giving you this letter said he would give it to you. I miss you so much. Even though our relationship is quite strange, it has meant so much to me, as I told you many times. Is it an impossible dream that we will be together again one day? I don’t think that is too much to hope for in this life, though sometimes I think it is, and I don’t know what is going to happen to me. I guess I’m just a real crazy fuck-up.

  When I think about our relationship, I get depressed, but I am willing to continue it if the opportunity presents itself. I hope you are happy and healthy, and whatever befalls, remember that someone loves you. It makes me joyous just to be able to write that With all my LOVE,

  Frank

  (Eddie, ha ha)

  Eddie again. The name in the record shop and the name in the Blounts’ letter to Billy. Zimka was Eddie? I had to talk to the Blounts, both senior and junior.

  I phoned Timmy at his office.

  It looks as if I am going to Denver tomorrow. I’ll know for sure by the end of the day.”

  “Did your friend in L.A. call back?”

  “Not yet. But he’ll come through. Harvey is relentless.”

  “Have you ever been to Denver? You’ll go for it.”

  “I spent twenty years in Salt Lake City one summer, but that’s the extent of my acquaintanceship with the mountain states.”

  “Denver’s a nice town. And it’s not called the Queen City of the Rockies for no good reason.”

  “A mile-high San Francisco.”

  “Hardly that, but still-nice. Lots of opportunities for immorality.”

  “In your ear.”

  “I hope you’ve spent a moral morning. If so, you’re on your way. Did you know that after twelve years your soul heals, like your lungs after you’ve quit smoking?”

  “What about immoral thoughts? Do they count? I had one awhile ago.”

  “Hey, now you’ve got the idea! Yes, they count. But not as much as deeds.”

  I said, “By the way, Mark and Phil are now living together. I called Mark to find out if he’d been getting funny phone calls like Huey Brownlee’s. Margarita Mayes has been getting them too, and somebody tried to break into her and Chris’s house last night. I suggested they stay away from their apartments for a few days, and that’s when Mark told me. I’m worried.”

  “They’re a good pair-it should work. Is it Zimka you’re worried about?”

  “I think so, yes. The only thing I’m sure of is they’re all connected in some messy, volatile way Kleckner, Blount, Zimka, Truckman, Chris Porterfield, Stuart Blount, Jane Blount-the lot. And then there’s this Eddie-the wild card.” I told him about the two letters, from the Blounts to their son, and from Zimka to Blount. “I’m seeing the Blounts at one. Maybe they’ll clear things up, out of character as that might be for them.” Then I told him what I had decided to do that night.

  “Do you want me to go with you? And bring the Leica?”

  “Yeah. I do. Wear your track shoes.”

  “Am I gay, or am I gay?”

  Soon after I hung up, the mail arrived. There was a thank-you note on a little engraved card from

  “Mrs. Hugh Bigelow.” A lapsed feminist. That was depressing, but I guessed everybody found a way. Also among the bills and clutter was an envelope with a check for two thousand dollars from Stuart Blount. I signed it over to the Rat’s Nest Legal Defense Fund and stuck it in my wallet along with Mike Truckman’s check.

  At a quarter to twelve Harvey Geddes called from Los Angeles. He’d spent most of the night, he said, trying to track down someone with a current address for Kurt Zinsser of the FFF, and after driving from West Hollywood to Santa Monica to Venice and back to Hollywood again, he’d found it. I wrote down the phone number and the building and apartment number on a street in Denver. I told Harvey I owed him one, and he agreed.

  I trekked up Central to Elmo’s in search of nourishment to gird myself for a visit with the Stuart Blounts, of State Street and Saratoga.

  16

  “Another thousand?” Blount said, “Well-i suppose you know your business, Mr. Strachey. Of course, I will be needing an itemized statement of expenses at some future point in time. For tax purposes, you understand.”

  We were seated in our customary places in the Blount salon, the missus sucking daintily on her long white weed, Blount pere eyeing me gravely across his early-American checkbook. I’d thought about asking for twenty-five thousand but concluded that that would be pushing it. He forked over the grand, and I sn
atched it up.

  “May I ask,” he said, “where you’ll be flying to tomorrow, Mr. Strachey?”

  I said, “Caracas.”

  His eyebrows went up. Hers did not. She said, “We’re being taken for a ride.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Stuart, he’s playing us for a fool, and you’re not stopping him.”

  I said, “I have the address where your son is staying. I received it from a contact in Los Angeles an hour and twenty minutes ago. I’ll be with Billy tomorrow night.”

  “Billy’s not in Argentina!” she snapped. “What do you take us for?”

  I said, “Venezuela. Caracas is in Venezuela.”

  Blount said, “Mr. Strachey, really-how on earth could Billy have-”

  “Who is Eddie?” I said.

  She gave Blount an I-told-you-so look. He sighed, not so much at my question, I guessed, as at her look.

  “Mr. Strachey,” Jane Blount said, “have you ever heard it said that gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail?”

  “I’ve heard it said, yes. Henry Stimson is usually credited with the line, or is it Liz Smith?

  Anyway, who is Eddie? Billy will tell me when I see him, I expect, so why don’t you save me a small expenditure of energy and yourself the financial expense of my remaining an additional ten minutes in-Caracas. Okay?”

  “Why must you know about Eddie, Mr. Strachey?” Blount said. “It is, I’m sorry to say, a private family matter.”

  “Because Eddie is a part of the puzzle. I’ll know which part when I know who or what he is. The safety of three or more people could depend on my knowing.”

  Jane Blount shot smoke in the air. Her husband shifted in his chair and made an impatient face.

  “Eddie is a separate matter, Mr. Strachey. Truly, he is. You must believe that. He’s got nothing to do with this situation Billy’s gotten himself into. You have my personal assurance on that. Can you accept that? Can you?” He looked at me imploringly.

  I said, “I might have if it weren’t for the fact that Eddie’s name has cropped up elsewhere in my travels.”

  They looked at me. Jane Blount said, “Where?”

  “Does the name Frank Zimka mean anything to you?”

  He said, “No.”

  She said, “Lord, no! Zim-ka? It sounds Polish!”

  I said, “He’s a friend of Billy’s. An acquaintance.”

  “And he knows Eddie?” she said, looking queasy.

  I said, “I’m one of the few people left in Albany who knows nothing about Eddie-next to nothing. Now, who the bloody hell is Eddie?”

  I startled them.

  She said, “He’s-he’s Billy’s favorite uncle.”

  What shit. I said, “Tell me more.”

  “Stuart’s brother Eddie-Billy and he were so close when Billy was young, it was quite touching, really. And then Eddie went away. He’s in shipping, you see.” Mistah Kurtz. “Uncle Eddie lived in the Levantine for many years, but recently he returned to this country, and Stuart and I thought he might exert his good influence with Billy so that Billy could finally be straightened out. So to speak. Don’t you think there’s good sense in that, Mr. Strachey? Some sound counsel from a wise and sophisticated and much-loved uncle?”

  Straightened out. I thought about dropping the Sewickley Oaks business on them, but that would have been showing off, and in any case I had my own plans for that particular side of the equation.

  “Well, why didn’t you just tell me that in the first place? Is Uncle Eddie a leper? a syphilitic? a Pole? What’s the big secret?”

  Blount was sitting with his head back and his eyes squeezed shut. I’d have felt sorry for him if I hadn’t known what a dangerous man he was.

  Jane Blount said, “Uncle Eddie is-a socialist.”

  “In shipping?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he’s no idealogue.”

  “No,” she said. “At least he’s not that.”

  They were hopeless. I’d find out what I had to from my own sources, including their son, for whom there was evidence of sanity, even good sense. That sometimes happened in families.

  I said, “When I see Billy tomorrow, I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear about Uncle Eddie’s being back. The news should make my job that much easier.”

  She took on a confused look. Her husband appeared as if, while his wife and I chatted, he’d slipped on his death mask. I waited.

  In her embarrassment Jane Blount turned surly. “Just bring Billy back here to Albany, Mr.

  Strachey. That’s what Stuart’s paid you a good deal of money to do. Bring Billy to this house our home and his-and you’ll be paid a cash bonus. You haven’t asked for that, I know, but I feel confident that you will accept it.” She looked at me as if I were the Lindbergh kidnapper.

  I got up to leave, and Stuart Blount sprang to life. The missus excused herself, swooped into the foyer, deposited her ashtray in the maid’s waiting mitt, and ascended the stairs. Blount walked me to the front door and out onto the stoop. He closed the door behind us.

  He breathed deeply and said, “Eddie is an old school friend of Billy’s. From the Elwell School.

  They were quite close.” I guessed what that meant. “The boys have been out of touch for a number of years, and now Eddie is back in the area and Jane and I thought Billy might be more eager to come back to us if he knew we would reunite him with Eddie. Call it blackmail if you like, Mr. Strachey, but remember that we’re doing it for our only son, whom we love very much.

  Is it all right now? Have I reassured you?

  “You have,” I said. “I’d like to meet Eddie. Could you arrange it? He might be able to clear some things up for me in connection with the killing.”

  He put his arm on my shoulder and spoke in a fatherly way. “Mr. Strachey, I appreciate the special interest you’ve taken in this matter, I sincerely do. But, truth to tell, don’t you feel that that end of the situation would best be left to our police department? There are detectives who are paid good salaries to carry out the work that you seem to have taken on-at my expense!” He shook with mirth and waited for me to join him.

  “I’ve been in touch with one of those highly paid detectives,” I said, “and although the man does, I suppose, have his virtues-dedication, cleanliness, perhaps thrift-he definitely is on the wrong track on this case. My sorting through this Eddie business just might point us all in the right direction, the police included. And I can’t put it to you too strongly, Mr. Blount, that a speedy resolution to all this lethal craziness could just possibly save people’s lives. That has to be a part of what we’re about here.”

  He gazed off into the park. I followed his eyes and saw a jogger stop and talk to a young man standing beside his bicycle.

  Blount looked back at me and said, “No. I’m sorry, but I’ll have to give you a firm no on that. It’s Eddie’s parents, you see. They’ve become friends of Jane’s and mine, and I’ve given them my word. They are looking after Eddie’s best interests, and I can certainly appreciate that. The boy has just moved back to this area and is working hard to establish himself, and his parents are quite insistent that Eddie not be brought into this extremely anxiety-provoking situation of Billy’s. It is a separate matter, as I’ve pointed out, Mr. Strachey, and, I have to insist, an entirely private one. I’m sorry. The answer to your request is no.”

  The jogger and the bicyclist walked off together.

  I said, “Eddie just moved back to this area recently? How recently?” I was confused again.

  Blount said, “I simply am not at liberty to discuss Eddie’s situation. I’m so sorry.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “I’ll do what I can with what I’ve got. I’ll do it the hard way. I’ll be in touch, Mr. Blount.”

  I left him standing there and walked up State Street.

  I picked up the Rabbit on Central and drove down to the Dunn Bridge, across the river, and east on Route 20 toward Massachusetts.

  Th
e erratic weather had failed to bring out the colors of the foliage that year, and as I approached the Berkshires, the hills were drab even under the bright sky. When I reached Lenox after an hour’s drive, a low cloud cover had slid in, and the place had a desolate November feeling to it, with Thanksgiving still more than a month away.

  I got directions at a colonial-style Amoco station and found the Elwell School down the road from Tanglewood, which was shut down for the season, a chain across the gate with the big lions on posts. Like Tanglewood, the Elwell School was a disused turn-of-the-century estate, its monumental-frilly Beaux Arts main building looking like a miniature Grand Central Station. Most of the Berkshire prep schools had gone under in recent years-Cranwell, Foxhollow, the Lenox School-and Elwell had the look of a place clinging to life. A fancy sconce beside the main door rested on the gravel driveway, smashed, and had been replaced on the stone wall above it with a vertical fluorescent tube of the type found beside motel bathroom mirrors. An oval window had been filled in with plywood.

  In the headmaster’s office, I showed my ID to a pleasant woman in a cardigan sweater and said I was trying to trace the whereabouts of a dear old friend of my client. She led me down a high-ceilinged corridor and unlocked a door which led into a small, windowless room the size of a storage closet. This, she said, was the alumni office. I wouldn’t be allowed access to the alumni files, but I was welcome to look through the yearbooks and newsletters. And if I found the man I was looking for, the woman said, the school would forward mail, provided it had a current address on file. She switched on the ceiling light and left me there.

  I went through the 1971 yearbook, making a list of all the Edwins and Edwards. There were seven, as well as one Eduardo. Billy Blount was neither pictured nor mentioned as a graduating senior or as an underclassman.

  Blount did show up in the 1970 volume, grinning sleepily and a bit warily at the camera-not, however, among the graduating class photos, but on a separate page at the back of the book for seniors who had not completed the school year. There were two other boys as well who had dropped out. One was a Clarence Henchman, of Westfield, New Jersey, who looked as if he were coming down with mononucleosis. The other nongraduating senior was Edwin Storrs, of Loudonville, New York. There was a hurt, frightened look in his’ eyes, and his blandly handsome teenage male model’s face was that of a relatively fresh and unsullied Frank Zimka.