Death Vows

by Richard Stevenson

  “Sturdivant thinks Moore is so gaga over Fields – who is some kind of knockout looker and charmer – that he won’t even consider criticism of the lad or discuss Fields’ possible crass motives. Yes, Sturdivant is going behind his friend’s back, but he thinks he has no choice. Moore may have some dough, and once the two marry, Fields will become his sole heir.”

  “This sounds treacherous, Don. Like some swamp of jealousy and petty intrigue. This Sturdivant sounds less like a concerned friend than a major troublemaker.”

  “Oh, a swamp of jealousy and intrigue. Timothy, has it slipped your mind what it is I do for a living? There are clients, and there are clients. Anyway, this guy is Hello Kitty next to some of the people whose fees I have accepted over the years.”

  “And lived to regret a few.”

  “This is true. There’s another angle that’s tantalizing, though. Fields has a pal who calls himself a Kennedy cousin. Says his name is Bud Radziwill. Sturdivant thinks Bud the Kennedy Cousin is also a phony, and the two of them are up to something.”

  Timmy laughed. “Bud Radziwill? Even if he’s somehow genuine, he’d have to be a Kennedy cousin eight times removed. I knew a Mario Cuomo staffer once whose name was Alan Kennedy, and whenever he went into a bar he’d tell women he was a Kennedy cousin. Over the years dozens of ‘amazing chicks,’ as he described them, fell into his arms. He’d always say he had just come from a gathering of the clan at Hyannis Port. And of course what he didn’t tell these ‘chicks’ was, he was a cousin of Wally and Angie Kennedy of Utica.”

  “Timothy, you have all these Kennedy stories, and I have none. I want to meet this Radziwill guy, and then I’ll have a Kennedy story too. I hope you won’t mind. JFK was your president, you Peace Corps types. I know you’re proprietary about him.”

  “But, Don, you had your president too – LBJ. And you’ve got plenty of Johnson stories. Or johnson with a small J.” He chuckled.

  This was an uncharacteristically crude remark from Timmy, and snider than I was used to. I said, “The Vietnamese word for penis is eunice. Did you know this?”

  He laughed and hung up, and I got busy.

  Chapter Two

  “I think you may have legitimate grounds for suspicion,” I told the two men seated across from me at Pearly Gates, Great Barrington’s only restaurant with LA-style valet parking. When my aging Nissan had been yanked from my grasp half an hour earlier, my impulse was to yell for the police. The place itself was the color of money, green and black, with gleaming napery and flatwear to which no bits of last night’s osso buco adhered. The maitre d’ was a bit Paulie Walnuts-like for “ America ’s Premiere Cultural Resort,” as the Berkshires had begun advertising themselves in recent seasons. But the overall feel of the place where Jim Sturdivant had suggested we meet was comfortable enough, and my Sam Adams had been well chilled but not to the point of hypothermia.

  Sturdivant and his boyfriend, Steven Gaudios, gazed at me with anticipation across the bun basket. Both were tieless, but both wore perfectly rumpled seersucker jackets over soft white shirts of a style that men of a certain class had seen as essential to their presentations of themselves since the fall of Constantinople. In their mid-sixties, Sturdivant and Gaudios were both good-looking, dark-eyed men who seemed to be aging serenely in one of the several ways American money can buy. Their pleasant looks were both of the Mediterranean variety, a surprise in Sturdivant’s case, as his voice had suggested more of a Congregationalist background. Neither man had seemed to object to my more functional garb of khakis, T-shirt and leather jacket; this was the Berkshires, where dress codes did exist, even with Edith Wharton’s having departed nearly a century earlier, but they were not rigidly enforced.

  “So we were right!” Sturdivant said excitedly.

  “We knew it!” Gaudios said. “What did you find out? My God, that was quick!”

  I explained that while neither Barry Fields nor Bud Radziwill had a criminal record, according to my preliminary inquiries, and that both had satisfactory credit records, neither man had seemed to exist at all prior to their arrival in western Massachusetts six years earlier. Neither had birth records I was able to locate in either Colorado or Massachusetts, or school or early work histories. I told Sturdivant and Gaudios that further Internet and other digging might turn up more recent good or bad information in those two states or others, but the fact that the two men seemed to have been created Adam-and-Steve-like out of the ether just six years previously was in itself a cause for concern.

  It was possible, I said, that there was some legitimate reason for their identities being of apparent recent manufacture. It was just barely plausible that they were in the Federal Witness Protection Program, although their youth made that unlikely. They also could have been adopted as teens and changed their last names from something else, though the new identities seemed to have been taken on when the two men were in their early twenties, not several years before. They could, of course, have changed their names for religious or even political reasons, but those types of transformations tended to involve turning from Ed Jones to Ali Hassan Bab-el-Mandeb or Solstice Summerfallwinterspring, not to Barry Fields and Bud Radziwill. And there was also the interesting twist that the two young men’s identities apparently emerged at exactly the same moment.

  I said, “I was surprised to discover that Bud is actually Radziwill’s real name. Bud is usually a nickname, but it’s on his driver’s license and car registration, it’s how he is registered to vote in Great Barrington, and it’s the name on his paycheck at Barrington Video. Have either of you ever heard him called anything else?”

  “No,” Sturdivant said. “He’s always just been Bud.”

  “Or ‘Prince,’” Gaudios said and rolled his eyes.

  “How does Bud explain his Kennedy connection?” I asked. “People must be interested in that and ask about it.”

  Now they both rolled their eyes. I was beginning to fear for the integrity of their optic nerves. Sturdivant said, “Well, how can he explain it? He can’t! He once told me he was related to the Kennedys by marriage, like his ‘Aunt Lee,’ as he calls her. When I pressed him, Bud said it was too complicated to explain, but the family didn’t make the petty distinctions I was attempting to draw. ‘The family‘! Can you believe it?”

  Gaudios said, “Some of us wondered if Bud might be the illegitimate spawn of Teddy and some West Yarmouth bar girl, but Bud hasn’t got Teddy’s red nose!” They both haw-hawed over this and sipped their martinis.

  I asked if it was certain that Barry and Bud had arrived in the Berkshires together, or if it was possible that they had met in Great Barrington and formed their friendship there.

  “Oh no, they showed up together,” Sturdivant said and signaled the passing waiter for a refill on his drink. Gaudios gestured at his glass too. “I know they arrived together because they were looking for work, and Tom Weed hired them both to clean out his gutters and do some other jobs around his property. They had an old, red, beat-up pickup truck they drove around. They got a lot of the yard jobs the Mexicans didn’t get, because the Mexicans didn’t have trucks.”

  “And the Mexicans probably weren’t gay. How out were Barry and Bud?”

  “I know Bud flirted with Tom, even though it was Barry that ended up with him,” Sturdivant said. “Their gaydar must have picked up on Tom right away, perhaps because he was an antiques dealer in a town where so many of the antiques dealers are gay. These men, many of whom are our friends, don’t go around waving the rainbow banner the way the women do. But people in town know who is in bed with whom, believe me.”

  I said, “And Barry and Bud somehow knew this too. Or quickly scoped out the situation. So, they arrived in town in this old truck?”

  “Apparently, yes.”

  “I don’t suppose you recall where it was registered, what state’s tags it had on it?”

  They thought about this. Gaudios said, “Tom would know. But he’s not here to tell us. Tom was a marvelous man. We
miss him tremendously. If Barry had just… on that horrible night…” Gaudios squeezed his fist, and the two men looked distraught and angry as they remembered their friend and his slow death in his garage.

  The waiter brought me my gazpacho, and my two tablemates their mussels in lime broth and their fresh martinis.

  I said, “I’m going to ask around about Barry and Bud as discreetly as I can without letting anyone know who I am and that I’m investigating them. You should know that this may involve a few minor misrepresentations on my part.”

  I thought that might bring out some squeamishness, but Sturdivant just chuckled. “I had a long, successful career in public relations, Don.” He grinned, as if this needed no further explanation.

  “It’s a black art, I know. The practice of making bullshit exquisite.”

  Gaudios looked startled. “Jim had many major corporate clients!” He glanced over at Sturdivant, perhaps to see if he was going to slap my face with his lap linen.

  But Sturdivant just smiled and said, “A smallish distortion in the service of a larger truth is something I became comfortable with a long time ago.”

  “Who were your clients?” I said. “Maybe I should be asking for my money back from some of them.”

  Sturdivant named four Fortune 500 companies which, according to environmental, consumer and human rights groups, were brazen in their regular employment of the Big Lie. I said, “Jim, you’re under arrest. Eliot Spitzer is waiting outside with his paddy wagon, and I’d much appreciate it if you would come along with me without making a fuss.”

  He smiled. “I spent years taking grief from the goo-goo types. The Sierra Club, Consumers Union, all the rest. I knew them all, got along splendidly with most of their people, and wined and dined many of them right here in this very room. But in my retirement, these are the types of people up with which I no longer have to put.”

  “Right,” I said. “Fuck them and the horse in upon which they rode.”

  Gaudios looked at me in annoyed disbelief. I was disrespecting a man he must have thought of as a great American and who perhaps gave excellent handjobs.

  I said, “Tell me about your friend Bill Moore. He retired to the Berkshires from a government job?”

  “Bill moved to the area about five years ago from Washington, DC,” Sturdivant said. “He’s originally from the Midwest somewhere, but he retired here at the suggestion of another federal retiree, Jean Watrous. Jean is a dyke friend of Bill’s whose family is from Lee. It was after nine-eleven when a lot of city people with second homes here were moving up permanently or spending long weekends, so real estate was tightening. Bill got here just in time, before the market went through the roof. He’s retired, but Bill is not as old as some of us lovelies of a certain age, and he still works part time for a Springfield computer firm. Currently he’s helping install a new computer system in the Lenox school system.”

  I said, “Bill and Jean Watrous are close friends?”

  “They play golf together, and we see them eating together at Twenty Railroad, the tavern down the street from here. Sometimes they’re with Barry; sometimes it’s just the two of them. Jean’s ladyfriend, Gwenn, is in Romania teaching journalism for six months, but Jean had to stay behind to look after her elderly mother.”

  “And what does Jean think of Bill marrying Barry?” I asked.

  Sturdivant and Gaudios looked at each other. “There is no way we could possibly know what Jean thinks,” Gaudios said. “Jean is not someone who particularly likes men.”

  “But isn’t her good friend Bill Moore a man? I’m confused.”

  “Well, they have this work connection,” Sturdivant said. “But Jean has never been especially fond of Steven and me.”

  “I’m sure you know the type,” Gaudios said, and when I could think of no reply to that, he made what I surmised to be a whinnying sound. Then he and Sturdivant chuckled.

  How had I gotten mixed up with these two? Oh, right. Sturdivant was paying me a fat fee. Timmy would be proud that I had not reached over and tipped the two plates of mussels in a lime broth onto their tastefully appointed laps.

  I said, “Tell me more about your own friendship with Bill. You’re not close enough to him to tell him you’ve hired me to investigate his boyfriend and not have him object. But you see yourselves as close enough to care greatly about his wellbeing and to believe that if he were thinking rationally he would appreciate your efforts on his behalf. Can you clarify your relationship? The picture is hazy to me.”

  “I do believe Bill would describe us as among his closest friends in the Berkshires,” Sturdivant said, in a tone that was both defensive and injured. “We met Bill soon after he arrived in the area, at a Supper Club dinner where he hoped to meet other gay men, and we immediately liked him and set out to be as helpful as we possibly could.”

  “Bill was really terribly alone and forlorn when he arrived here,” Gaudios said. “We tried to include him and make him feel welcome, and I have to say that to a considerable degree we succeeded in doing just that.”

  “When did you see him last?” I said.

  They both peered into the pile of mussel shells they had been collecting in a bowl in the center of the table.

  “I think last week,” Sturdivant said.

  Gaudios said, “At the post office, was it?”

  “Or at Guido’s?”

  I said, “Who is Guido?”

  “Guido’s is the upscale market where we all buy our groceries and wine,” Sturdivant said. “It’s just south of town. People from Albany drive over here just to shop at Guido’s. I’m surprised you don’t know it.” He looked at me as if I might have had a stick of beef jerky protruding from my breast pocket or from between my teeth.

  “And when did you see Moore before that?”

  This seemed to stump them. “I’m not sure,” Sturdivant said. “Why do you ask?”

  What was the deal with these two and Bill Moore? They were seeming less and less like “dear friends” of Moore and more like casual or even distant acquaintances. It was they who seemed to be “up to something,” if anybody was. Maybe, I began to think, the way to go here was to do some honest but perfunctory checking up on Fields and Radziwill, write a report, collect my fee, and move on.

  I mumbled something about wanting to get a picture of Moore ’s habits, and then asked, “How did Moore meet Barry? At the Supper Club?”

  The eye-rolling this time bordered on the violent. “Oh, my dear!” Gaudios said, and both men guffawed.

  “No,” Sturdivant said. “Barry was not and is not a member of the Supper Club.”

  “Why is that? He doesn’t eat?”

  “It’s not a question of eating, but of being eaten,” Sturdivant said, and leered with amusement. “No, really,” he went on, “Barry did come to dinner as someone’s guest a few times, but he chose not to become a member. He was younger than most of us, and I think he just felt a tad out of place. In any event, this was prior to Bill’s arrival in the area. I’m not sure where they might have met. Have you any idea, Steven?”

  “My God, I think I know!”

  “Where? What?”

  Gaudios said, “They met at Tom’s funeral!”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “They did. Bill came with Jean, and naturally Barry was there – having just all but murdered poor Tom – and putting on quite a show of grief. What Barry didn’t know was, Tom had left everything to his sister in Worthington – this was before marriage was a viable option for gays – and Barry was about to be left homeless. Tom’s sister is a vicious bitch, and Barry was ass-over-teakettle out on the street within a week.”

  I said, “And he moved in with Bill Moore?”

  “Not immediately,” Sturdivant said. “I think Barry moved in with Bud for a month or two. But Barry and Bill began dating. With Tom barely settled in his grave, everyone commented that it was all in exceptionally poor taste.”

  The waiter returned and made off with the plate of mussel s
hells and my empty soup bowl. There were only a few other diners in the room, and the service was brisk, as if to compensate for any delays during the two summer months when Berkshire restaurants were jam-packed with New Yorkers anxious about dealing with the check in order to arrive at Tanglewood or a play or dance performance on time.

  I said, “I’m still puzzled.”

  “About what?” Sturdivant asked.

  “About the vague circumstantiality of your suspicions. The state cops were satisfied with the accidental-death story of Tom Weed’s passing. I know a few Massachusetts state homicide investigators, and these people are no dummies. Barry’s hooking up with Bill Moore soon after Tom’s death is the sort of early remarriage – re-boyfriending in this case – that always sets tongues wagging. But loneliness and emotional need sometimes give decorum a poke in the eye, and usually there’s no harm done. I’ll go ahead and check further on Barry Fields, if that’s what you guys want. His apparent cover-up of his past is unsettling, I grant you that. But I have to tell you, my inclination is to visit Bill Moore and say, ‘Hey – what’s the deal? Your fiancé seems to have adopted a new identity six years ago. What do you make of that, Bill?’ And just see what he says. That approach could introduce an element of clarity into the situation that right now is lacking.”

  Sturdivant and Gaudios looked at me stonily. Sturdivant said, “But that is not the approach I am paying you to take. It is not the approach you agreed to take.”

  “It’s just a suggestion, Jim. I thought I might try an approach that has a better chance of success than the one I am currently slogging along with.”

  The efficient waiter, a clean-shaven, hazel-eyed youth clad in the green and black colors of the room, arrived with an assistant in tow, and they placed before each of us plates the size of Soviet tractor discs. Sturdivant’s and Gaudios’s were each adorned with a morsel of tilapia on a bed of what looked like sea urchin spines, and I got my side of beef and heap o’ starches.

  Sturdivant remained sulkily mute as we dug in, but after a moment Gaudios said, “You’re quite trim, Don, for a man who eats like there’s no tomorrow. How do you manage that?”