"No, it's not," he said, looking bitter now. "It's the obvious explanation. Just because you've never seen Grey Koontz, you don't believe it. What kind of solipsistic bullshit is that? If you have no personal knowledge of something, then it can't be true? I thought you were smarter than that. What other explanation could there be, anyway? Eddie was at work. He was there when you called."
"I called half an hour after the fire started. It takes twenty minutes from here to Kopy-King. Eddie could have been back with plenty of time to spare."
He waved this away. "All right, he could have done a lot of things, but he didn't. Look, the cops will check Eddie out, and where he was at the time of the fire, and then you'll be satisfied. In the meantime, who knows what that fucking Slinger has in store for me next. If you want to be skeptical, be skeptical. I don't care. Spend as much time investigating Eddie as investigating me. Just help protect me, will you? If you want to think of it as protecting me from myself, go ahead and think of it that way. I'm going to write you a check right now." He pulled out a checkbook from under the stack of documents.
I said nothing and watched him write the check, and I thought about it. Then I made a decision. More out of curiosity over what I had come to see as a fascinating disturbed personality with a tiny role to play in gay history-more for that than for any other reason (such as my wanting to get a longer, closer look at the despicable files), I said, "John, I'm willing to work for you for the next twenty-four hours."
He said, "That's a start."
"I'm not going to cash the check," I said. "And if at the end of twenty-four hours I have concluded that you have lied to me and involved me in an elaborate hoax, I'll return the check personally and I'll stomp on your shot foot. How's that?"
He handed me the check. "I understand your position," he said. "You have a reputation to protect and you have to do what you have to do. But I'm not worried. I don't have much to fall back on, but I do have my personal integrity. And if that's your only concern, I'm on firm ground. Just let me know when your belief in me has been restored."
Restored? I said, "Do you want to stay at my place overnight? You'll be safe there, I'm certain."
"That's not really necessary. Eddie will be here and we can take turns sleeping. I think my gun was damaged in the fire, but Eddie has another one."
"Registered?"
"No. From the bodega, like mine."
"I'll try to get the Handbag cops to increase their coverage of the house. After the fire, that should be no problem."
He agreed and I phoned the Handbag police station. I reached Octavio Reed, who said, "Before we do anything at all out there, you should talk to the chief. He knows of you and he wants to meet you. Don't say anything about-you know."
"No way."
"Chief Bailey wants to see you this afternoon if you can make it. He's out right now. Can you come at two?"
"I'll be there."
"Just don't trust those two," he said, and rang off.
"I'm meeting the chief this afternoon about arranging additional protection," I told Rutka, and could see him working up to a fit over the delay, when Sandifer walked in.
"Oh, jeez, look at the porch! This is- Oh, jeez!"
"It's a mess," Rutka said.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, but there's a ridiculous new development that I should tell you about."
"What?"
"Vera Renfrew told the police she saw somebody suspicious go down her yard and up ours before the bomb was thrown."
Sandifer stared. "She did?"
"She said she saw you."
Sandifer's face fell forward, along with much of the rest of his upper body. "Oh, that's just great," he said finally. "Jeez, why would she say a thing like that? That's crazy."
"I guess it was somebody who looked like you," Rutka said.
After a brief, frozen instant, Sandifer said, "Oh, no, not-"
"It makes sense, doesn't it?"
"Grey Koontz."
They went on in this vein for some minutes, and I kept thinking, They had a scam worked out that went awry and now they're making it up as they go along. end user
7
The insurance agent soon showed up, trying to look delighted about shelling out a few thousand of the home office's zillions, and while he and Sandifer and Rutka surveyed the reeking and charred mess on the back porch, I went upstairs.
En route to the attic I looked into Rutka's and Sandifer's room and spotted the telephone answering machine Rutka had mentioned earlier. The message light was blinking. This had to have been the call Rutka and I had heard from the attic a few minutes before the fire broke out, and which Rutka had said not to bother with.
I pushed the playback button. There were a couple of clicks and that was it. The caller had hung up.
In the attic the sauna heat hit me again. It was hard to imagine that men paid large sums of money to join fashionable clubs so that they could sit around in places like this and perspire recreationally. I peeled off my sopping polo shirt and hung it over the front of the whirring box fan.
The file I pulled out first, on Bruno Slinger, was thicker than most. It contained press clippings on the Republican state senator Slinger worked for, and Slinger, as the senator's occasional spokesman, was quoted from time to time, always in support of conservative causes: anti-abortion, anti-social services, and, amazingly, antigay. News photos of the senator in groups often included Bruno Slinger in the background.
Slinger had an easy, smug look in his press clips, but in his other photos he was more somber. In one Polaroid his cheek was bulging with the erect member of a physically fit Caucasian male whose bare upper body was out of the shot. The member was condomless, not a good idea anymore. The notation on the back said "Slinger and G. Koontz" and gave a date from the previous fall.
Handwritten notes by Rutka paired Slinger's name with those of a dozen or so other men, with dates and locations noted, most of them motels in the Albany area. The name Grey Koontz did crop up several times. I reexamined the photo with "G. Koontz" on the back to see if the man in it resembled Sandifer, and while their builds were similar, the focus on the man's organ rather than his face made evaluation difficult. Still, it occurred to me that Rutka and Sandifer might actually be telling the truth about a Slinger-Koontz frame-up attempt.
Several handwritten letters were in the Slinger file, each in a different script. One, dated the previous October, began: "Hi, John.
Just thought you'd like to know that Bruno Slinger is a cocksucker." It was signed "A. Friend." There was no return address; the mailing envelope stapled to the letter was postmarked Albany.
Another note read: "Bruno Slinger is gay. Check it out." No signature or return address on that one either. A third, also unsigned and from Albany, informed the reader that "Bruno Slinger goes for boys." This could have meant underage youths or boys of thirty-five; the rest of the letter described in unoriginal language Sling-er's sexual practices and gave no further clue to his age preferences.
There were several similar letters offering firsthand knowledge of Bruno Slinger's homosexuality, and there were fifteen or twenty letters-often typewritten and literate-lacking evidence of personal experience but insisting on the fact of Slinger's queerness just the same. Many of these ill-wishers were especially venomous and used words such as "twisted" and "monstrous" and "evil" to describe Slinger's hypocrisy.
The Slinger file also included a note in Rutka's handwriting describing an anonymous phone threat, which Rutka speculated had come from Slinger. The caller had said, "You're going to get your balls ripped off for this one," and the call had come just a day after Slinger's outing in Cityscape.
I flipped back to the file for Ronnie Linkletter, the Channel Eight weatherman Rutka said Slinger was now involved with.
Linkletter's file was a thick one too. It contained a multicolor promotional brochure put out by Channel Eight detailing the weatherman's part in the station's "We're Hometown Folks" campaign. This was
where the station's news "personalities" went out into the community and showed, a tad superfluously, that the news broadcast by Channel Eight's newscasters existed in a context not of history but of themselves. They looked happy about this, and according to the ratings, the station's viewers seemed satisfied too. Ronnie Linkletter's part in the "We're Hometown Folks" effort was to go into clubs and schools and relate odd facts of meteorology.
Linkletter also was as comfortable in front of a Polaroid as he was on the Channel Eight news set. Ronnie was belly down in his single blurry snapshot, butt raised for the insertion of a sizeable organ whose owner's face was above the frame.
Linkletter, too, had been tattled on by anonymous letter writers. One began: "Dear Mr. Rutka-I have been reading your column and agree with you one thousand percent that queer people have to rise up or die. A life of oppression is no life at all…" The writer went on to proclaim his philosophical fraternalism with Rutka and then offered the name of a "media celebrity who has not accepted his own queerness but should be made to do so because he is well-liked in the community and would further establish queer omnipresence in the public mentality." The name was Linkletter's and the writer asserted that he once spent a night with Linkletter in the Fountain of Eden Motel on Route 5.
There were other, similar letters-Linkletter attracted a more casual, less incensed type of snitch than Bruno Slinger did-and an assortment of dated notes in Rutka's handwriting describing phone calls about Linkletter. One sheet of paper labeled "From JG Linkletter at motel with A" consisted of a long list of forty or fifty dates, each of them a week apart.
Linkletter's file also included an issue of the February third Cityscape in which Linkletter was outed, and a memo to the file on a phone call from Linkletter to Rutka after the outing, in which Rutka described Linkletter's rage and his stated intention to "bash your brains in." Rough language for a Hometown Folk.
I got out the list Rutka had given me with the names of the other people he claimed had threatened him. Besides Slinger's and Linkletter's, seven threats had been received. The two face-to-face encounters had been with the Times Union editorial writer, who met Rutka at Queequeg's restaurant and screamed, "You oughta have your black heart ripped out!" — no Pulitzer material in that-and with a Colonie auto-parts-store manager, who ran into Rutka in Macy's just before Christmas and told him he wouldn't be alive six months from then. Rutka had outlived that prediction already by more than a month.
The other five threats by identifiable people all came by phone. All threatened violent acts, even death; they were from a Schenectady orthodontist, an Albany court bailiff, an elementary-school principal in Troy, a state university physicist, and a retired professional hockey player.
I went through the files and took copious notes on all nine of the men who had threatened John Rutka-for what it was worth.
The attacks on Rutka could as easily have been made by one of the "countless," as he'd put it, anonymous callers who'd threatened him. Or by someone who had never threatened him at all. There was always that.
I flipped through a sampling of the other files. Some of the names I recognized from Rutka's columns in Cityscape and Queerscreed. Others, unouted as yet, were men and women I knew. My stomach began to churn, partly from hunger and partly from disgust, and my impulse was to alert these people immediately that they were on Rutka's list of possible outees. The ethical ramifications of my position with Rutka were becoming more complex by the minute.
That complexity was not lessened when I flipped through the front of the file one last time in search of a name that might mean something to me. I came to another one I recognized and gawked at for some seconds. Here was a file labeled "CALLAHAN, TIMOTHY."
The little bio note attached to Timothy Callahan's folder described him as an Albany man in his forties who worked as the chief legislative aide to New York Assemblyman Myron Lipschutz, and who resided in a house on Crow Street with his lover of fourteen years, private investigator Donald Strachey. The only piece of paper in the folder was a single phone memo dated April 25th: "Parmalee Plaza Hotel informant IDs Callahan entering room with guest who informant says he had the night before."
Poor Timmy. Just once he had embraced in terror the ghost of the district poultry officer he had lain dreaming about uselessly long ago in Visakhapatnam, and in doing so had exorcised that ghost, and now he had his name on an overbearing twit's hit list in an attic in Handbag. This was not fair. My opinion of John Rutka, which had seemed to bottom out in recent hours, began again to slide.
I stuffed my notes in my pocket, put my still-damp shirt back on, switched off the fan and the lights, and returned to the second floor, careful to double-lock the attic door. I zipped the keys back inside the hippo's belly.
With the insurance agent on the way down the front walk toward his burgundy Lincoln, I said to Rutka in the front hall, "My boyfriend's in your file."
A little dry laugh. "I thought you'd get a charge out of. that." Sandifer stood at the end of the hall grinning nervously.
"I don't."
"Oh, what the- It's just a fucking file!" He hobbled into the living room too fast, nearly stumbled, and went down hard on the couch. "There's nothing in the file except that one fucking call. What was I gonna do with it, anyway? I can't out somebody who's already out, can I? You two are the most famous queer couple in Albany. In the paper they refer to you as 'the Albany private investigator and acknowledged homosexual,' and Callahan is almost as notorious as you are. So please don't go all self-righteous on me, Strachey, because I would find that very, very hard to take."
I said, "What if I hadn't known?"
He rolled his eyes and sighed grandly. "Well, of course you'd know. Or if you didn't know, you wouldn't care. Hey, I know all about you, Strachey. You've been playing around on the side since day one, and it was only reasonable for me to assume that you and Callahan had an open relationship, and he was doing it too, and it was cool. Why are you making such a big fucking thing about this? I don't get it. I just don't get it."
He looked genuinely mystified. Sandifer came down the hall now and stood listening.
I said, "First of all, it's been years since I've had sex with men other than Timothy Callahan. For reasons of avoiding the plague, for Timmy's emotional well-being, and because it just doesn't seem to matter to me as much as it once did, I don't do it. And the fact is, he never did it. Emotionally it is not his style. But whatever the two of us do or don't do sexually, together or with others, John, the simple fact of the matter is, none of it is any of your goddamn business!"
I yelled the last part, and Rutka flinched.
Sandifer went and sat beside Rutka on the couch and took his hand and held it. Rutka's eyes were off in different directions; he began to shake his head from side to side. "Now I'm really fucked. I've alienated you, and I am totally, totally fucked. Oh, shit.
Shit, shit, shit."
I'd had enough. I said, "I think I need to get away from you, John. Before I punch your face in." Would I now have to add myself to the list of people who had threatened Rutka? "I'm going over to talk to the Handbag police about getting you some protection. I do believe, John, that you make people want to kill you, and maybe somebody really is trying to do it. You should stay here because the arson squad will be here soon. Eddie, can you wait here until I get back?"
"I'll call in at work," he said. "I can finish up some things this evening."
"Are you going to ditch me?" Rutka said, giving me the evil eye. "Because I left your boyfriend's folder in the file? I could have taken it out, you know. I thought about that. I left it in because I thought the only way you'd work with me was if I was straightforward with you and didn't hold anything back or hide anything. I guess I should have been more devious."
"Removing Timmy's file would not have been deviousness," I said. "That would be called tact-not giving offense when to do so would be petty or needless. But the real problem for me is, John, that there shouldn't have been a file on Timm
y up there in the first place, and there shouldn't be a file up there on ninety-eight percent of those people. Just as if I'd wandered into J. Edgar Hoover's personal cache in 1965, your files make me want to throw up."
He got a panicky look. "Are you quitting? Are you abandoning me?"
"Not yet. But I'm close to it. A lot will depend on what I find out about you from the Handbag police."
"Your mind is closed," he said with a moan, and I left. end user
8
As I pulled out, the arson squad drove up, two guys in jackets in a state car. I left Elmwood Place and turned north out of residential Handbag and past the old brick lady's-pocketbook factories the town had taken its name from in the 1880s. Handbag's last handbag had been produced in July of 1968, when the stitchers and clampers struck for a dollar-and-a-quarter-an-hour raise over three years, and management didn't even schedule a bargaining session. A union leader claimed the managers just left the screen doors flapping and drove out to the airport. I've read there's now a town in Malaysia called Hahndoo-Bahgoo.
The factories I passed were boarded up, some with roofs fallen in. Now people worked down in Albany for the state or in so-called "service industries," some of which were doing something socially useful-fixing cars, deciphering tax forms, delivering pizza-and many of which were not. Employing fifty or sixty people in Handbag was a new outfit I'd read about called Sell-You-Ler Telephone, a telemarketing firm. The company was paid large sums by other companies to bother people at home. It seemed an unlikely way to try to restore American economic competitiveness in the world, but that's probably not what Sell-You-Ler's owners had in mind. As I rolled up Broad Street, there the damn place was. I thought about going in and bothering somebody, but figured they would have systems in place to prevent this.
I grabbed a quick burger at a drive-up window, and when they asked me if I'd like an apple pie for dessert, I asked them if they'd like to read my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I said it was a wonderful novel.
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