Death Vows

by Richard Stevenson

  “Apprehension,” I said. “I metabolize much of what I eat into apprehension over what’s going to happen next. You won’t find this in Atkins or the South Beach diet, but it works for me.”

  Recovering his corporate-flack mien, Sturdivant said amiably, “I doubt you’ll have the opportunity to burn very many calories on this case, Don. Just find out who and what Barry Fields is, and the same for Bud Radziwill, if possible. It’s all fairly straightforward, as I see it. Would you please just do that? I’m prepared to offer a bonus of one thousand dollars if you’ll just complete this investigation in a straightforward manner and then hand me your report.”

  My cell phone throbbed against my kidneys. I ignored it and said, “Jim, usually in life you get what you pay for. In this case, I do believe you would be getting something less than what you paid for. However, I’m willing to run a routine check on Fields, ask a few more questions around town, report my findings to you, and then be on my way – no bonus necessary – if that is what you wish to hire me to do.”

  My cell phone vibrated with a second call just after the first unanswered one, meaning it was Timmy with something that couldn’t or shouldn’t wait. I excused myself – Sturdivant and Gaudios, predictably getting it backwards, looked at me if this was the height of impertinence – and walked out to the sidewalk in front of the restaurant to take the call.

  “I thought you would want to know,” Timmy said. “You had a call from Barry Fields, who insists on speaking with you. He sounded pretty upset. He’s apparently somewhere near where you are, and he left a number.”

  “How did he know to call me? He knows already who I am and that I’m checking up on him?”

  “He didn’t say. He just said it was urgent that you call him. It didn’t sound as if he knows you’re in Great Barrington now. He just said he needed to speak with you and that you’d know what it was about.”

  I wrote down the number Fields had left, told Timmy I might be late in getting back to Albany, and reentered Pearly Gates.

  I thought it over and then told Sturdivant and Gaudios, “Great Barrington is such a pretty little town. I’m looking forward to spending a few days here.”

  They both peered at me across their enormous dinner plates, exuding satisfaction.

  Chapter Three

  “Look, all we need to know is who it was that hired you to check up on us,” Fields said. “We have basically nothing to hide, so if you want to drag your ass around town dredging up the boring details of our boring lives, go ahead. Hey, go wild! All we’re asking is, just tell us who the fuck it is that is so interested in us that they would actually pay somebody money to track us and find out what we’re doing.”

  “It really is weird and kind of frightening being investigated by somebody,” Radziwill added. “It just seems fair that if a person is being put under a microscope by Big Brother, as it were, then that person should be able to find out who this particular Big Brother actually is.”

  We were in Radziwill’s apartment in the half-basement of an old frame house up the hill from Great Barrington’s downtown. The place was messy and comfortable in a college-apartment way, with wall posters of movie classics – Duck Soup, Open City, Band of Outsiders – and stacks of books and DVDs, along with a computer and printer. Simon’s Rock College was farther up the hill, so this apartment might have served at times as student housing – though conspicuously missing in post-grad Bud Radziwill’s current occupancy were the usual student-decor empty beer cans and ashtray roaches. Like others of his generation, Bud was a clean-living Kennedy cousin.

  Radziwill didn’t look much like a Kennedy, nor an offshoot of the Polish aristocracy either. He was willowy and wan in his jeans and T-shirt, with an oval face, watery blue eyes, straw-colored hair, and a sizeable tattoo on his right forearm that appeared to be an image of a right forearm with an open hand at the end of it. Fields was similarly dressed, and also light-haired, but sturdier, and with eyes more of an electric blue, and those ample and unnaturally red lips which Jim Sturdivant had noted were a big draw for Bill Moore. I saw why.

  Radziwill had nailed me after I did the responsible thing and used my real name and occupation while making inquiries about the two men with a clerk at Southern Berkshire District Court. The clerk, it turned out, was the sister of a man Radziwill had once dated, and she phoned Radziwill as soon as I hung up, and blabbed. Never trust anybody in small towns seemed to be the overly broad and cynical lesson here, though now I was the untrustworthy character in the eyes of my present interrogators. Also, the discretion I had promised Jim Sturdivant was kaput, and I had these two angry young men badgering me to identify the sinister power that was probing into both their lives.

  I said, “Unreasonable as it sounds, I cannot divulge to you who my client is. If you hired me, you would insist that your identity be kept confidential. It all has to do with the ethics of my profession.”

  “Horseshit,” Fields said reasonably.

  “Not to put too fine a point on it,” Radziwill said, “but I do believe it is we who occupy the ethical high ground here. Doesn’t your client have to… show probable cause or something before you have the right to start snooping around in innocent people’s private lives? Well, not legal probable cause, but just some… reason for investigating somebody?”

  “In this guy’s line of work,” Fields said, “the only justification necessary for him to go crashing around in somebody’s personal life is a big, fat cash retainer. Isn’t that a fact, Don?”

  “I’ll check the rule book when I get back to my office, Barry, but what you say sounds familiar.”

  They glared at me. Fields said, “So what are we, under investigation for terrorist activities? Is it that training camp in Afghanistan we went to during our junior year abroad? What set this off, Don?”

  “No,” I said. “If that was the case, it wouldn’t be me; it would be Dick Cheney in here with his battery pack and electrodes. Speaking of junior years abroad, by the way, do you mind if I ask a harmless, non-intrusive, pertinent question? Where did you two go to college?”

  Radziwill was draped over an easy chair, but Fields was poised and alert on a metal folding chair across from the sagging couch I was seated on, and he replied without hesitation. “I am certainly providing you with no information whatsoever about myself or anybody else until you tell me who it is who is investigating us and why. And Bud is not telling you anything either, are you, Bud?”

  “Nuh uh. I’m certainly not gonna say where I went to college. That’s personal data, so to speak.” When he pronounced college, it came out caahhlllege, and I thought, Texas – he’s from Texas. Radziwill had lost much of the accent, but there were lingering traces I had been hearing since I had met him, and this clinched it.

  I said, “Here’s the deal, guys. My client or clients is or are concerned that neither of you seems to have existed in any official record prior to your arrival in the Berkshires six years ago. Give me some plausible benign explanation for this mighty peculiar set of circumstances, and I’ll consider naming my client or clients – or at least urge him or her or them to waive the standard confidentiality agreement and give the okay for me to tell you who he or she or they are.”

  “So there’s definitely more than one client,” Fields said, sneering. “If there was only one, you would just refer to your ‘client.’ You wouldn’t be talking to us like some pedantic twit. This is quite helpful. We’re making steady progress here, Don.”

  I said, “No, we’re not. We’re making no progress whatsoever, Barry. Progress would be if you quit trying to change the subject to English usage from your highly suspect non-past. Where did you attend college? Where did you go to high school? Who was your kindergarten teacher, and did she sit you on her knee and press your face against her bosom, and did she smell of gardenias? These are questions no person whose past is other than shady would object to answering. But you two refuse to do so. I can only conclude that my clients – yes, there are two or more of the
m – that my clients are right to have you investigated. And I plan to continue to do so, with or without your cooperation or your opinion of me improving or falling even lower than it is now.”

  Radziwill said, “So it’s our past that your clients are interested in? Not our present?” He looked a little confused by what he seemed to think my answer would be, and Fields looked eager, too, to hear what I might say.

  “Past is prologue, somebody once said…”

  “Shakespeare,” Radziwill put in eagerly, except it came out more like Shükespeare.

  “…And it’s the continuum of your lives that is going to tell me whether or not you have something to hide, something from the past or the present or both. But I have no picture of a life narrative, in either of your cases, prior to your arrival in Great Barrington, despite my access to a variety of official and semi-official sources that can generally be relied upon to provide basic statistical and demographic information on American lives. Now that’s really weird, wouldn’t you say?” I didn’t mention rural Colorado and the parents with the internal diseases, since I was unsure how many people beyond Sturdivant and Gaudios to whom Fields had told this story.

  They looked at each other and then at me. Fields said, “We can’t tell you. I understand why there are certain things about our backgrounds that appear bad. Look, can we confide in you?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t mean confide in you totally. We just can’t do that. I mean, can I just admit to you that there are certain things about my life and about Bud’s life that are best left unexamined? I’m actually relieved that it’s our past you seem the most worried about, and not our present.”

  “Why? Because you’re feeling nervous and guilty about something you’re doing at the present time, or are about to do?”

  “No,” Fields said, “it’s because… because today both our lives are an open book. There’s nothing for a detective to uncover. I’m actually getting married in a few weeks. To a wonderful man, Bill Moore. I assume you know I’m gay, as is Bud. Everybody around here knows that.”

  “I was told that, yes.” And also about your red lips and radiant blue eyes, now just across the coffee table from me. I reached for an imaginary cigarette.

  “So it’s really disturbing that at this basically happy time of my life somebody is trying to find a way to fuck things up for me.”

  “I know you’ve had some bad luck and sadness in your recent life, Barry. I heard about Tom Weed.”

  Fields and Radziwill exchanged quick glances.

  “What did you hear?” Radziwill asked.

  “That you two had been lovers and he died in a carbon monoxide accident in the garage of the house where you both lived.”

  Fields winced. “Tom and I were not lovers.”

  “Oh?”

  “Tom was forty years older than I am, for chrissakes. We had sex a few times when we first met – his idea, not mine. But basically I looked after his gorgeous house and he let me live there, and we did some social things together. I suppose some people thought we were boyfriends. And Tom probably fed this impression with some people. It was good for his ego, and I knew it and didn’t much mind. But when he died his sister inherited the house. The fact that I was not in his will tells you a lot about how close our relationship really was – and wasn’t.”

  “And the sister threw you out soon after Tom died?”

  “Margaret was nice about it, actually, despite her discomfort with Tom’s being single and gay and the fact that she barely knew me. She said I could stay until the estate was settled and the house went on the market. But because of the way Tom died, I was anxious to get out. Did you hear that he died in the garage while I was upstairs asleep with the TV on, and I woke up too late and found him dead with the engine running and the garage full of fumes?”

  “I was told about that.”

  Radziwill said, “And did you hear that there are people around here who think Barry basically murdered Tom? That he knew all the while that Tom was down in the garage passed out and dying, and Barry was upstairs enjoying Bringing up Baby?”

  They both watched me. “I heard some people were saying something like that.”

  “It’s not true,” Fields said.

  “Okay.”

  “Tom Weed was a sweet man who was terrifically nice to me, and I wouldn’t have harmed him for the world. The night he died, I was tired from working a late shift at the theater the night before and then getting up early to meet the plumber who was installing a new pump in the basement. I just conked out while the TV was on, and Tom had had a few too many at a dinner party he went to, and… Life can be unfair and absurd. Death can be too.”

  “I’ve seen it happen.”

  “Luckily, the police saw exactly what happened.”

  I wondered about that. The state police had ruled the death accidental, which was plausible enough, and there was no real evidence to indicate otherwise. But the police were not in Fields’ bedroom to see him nod off while watching a movie. They just took his word for that. Negligent homicide or involuntary manslaughter – the scenarios Sturdivant and Gaudios and their chums hotly chewed over – would have been far-fetched charges for any prosecutor to pursue.

  I said, “So where did you go when you left the Weed house with all its unhappy associations?”

  “I moved in here with Bud for several months. Luckily he didn’t have a roommate at the time.”

  “And you met Bill Moore soon after Tom died?” At his funeral, for instance?

  “I’d known him a little and always liked him, and I found him attractive. But he thought I was Tom’s boyfriend and so never showed any interest in me, and I perceived his distance as actually not being interested. But he was interested, and once Tom was out of the picture one thing quickly led to another, and the fireworks were spectacular once they went off.”

  Fireworks? “You said you were not all that interested in older men romantically. What makes Bill Moore the exception to the rule?”

  They both laughed with astonishment. “Bill is no old fart,” Radziwill said in his soft drawl. “What Bill is is a hottie. I might choose to be jealous if I didn’t have my very own cutie pie to snuggle up to every night.”

  Fields said, “Josh should be home from work any minute now. You’ll meet him.”

  “But isn’t Bill retired? From a Commerce Department job?” I had pictured Moore as resembling a cabinet member for Bush-43 or even Bush-41, if not William McKinley.

  Radziwill looked over at Fields, as if this was his designated subject to address. Fields said, “Bill took early retirement. He wanted to get out of DC and have a less high-stress life here in the country. He’s only forty-eight and looks ten years younger. That’s twenty years between us – but it’s not a lot with life expectancies being what they are now.”

  “Right,” I said. “Fifty is the new Prague.”

  “How old are you, Don?” Radziwill asked. “By the way, we asked a friend in Albany about you. We know you’re one of us.”

  “Oh, you mean an Inuit transvestite? You’re certainly resourceful, Bud.”

  “Our friend said you used to look something like Tom Selleck but that you had outgrown that look.”

  “It’s funny how that works. It happened to Tom Selleck too.”

  “You look to be around Bill’s age,” Fields said.

  “I am, more or less. If fifty is the new Prague, I’m somewhere between Budapest and Dubrovnik.”

  Radziwill said, “I have relatives from Crakow. Are you Polish? Strachey sounds English.”

  “It is. Are you related to Lee Radziwill, by any chance?”

  “Yeah, Aunt Lee.”

  “But you’re related, I guess, on the Radziwill side, not the Bouvier side.”

  “Right. That’s why I have cousins in Crakow.”

  “So, what’s it like being that close to the… you know?”

  “Do you mean the Kennedys?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I�
��m not all that close. Oh, we used to go to the compound for holidays, or to Palm Beach. But a lot of those properties have been sold off or turned into museums. It’s not the way it used to be. The romance is pretty much gone and the family has drifted apart – as so many large, busy families do after a while.”

  I was about to suggest that maybe in his next incarnation Radziwill could join a famous family with more current glamour and cachet, the New York Clintons or the Illinois Obamas.

  But before I could, Radziwill’s boyfriend, Josh, came home from work and ambled in the door. It was the waiter from Pearly Gates. He exclaimed cheerily to Radziwill and Fields, “How did you ever let this guy in the door? He’s a friend of the toads!”

  I knew immediately who “the toads” were, and so, by the way their eyes bugged out, did Radziwill and Fields.

  Chapter Four

  “ They are your clients, aren’t they?” Fields said, in a tone and with a look that indicated I had been discovered to be in league with a well-known pair of local necrophiliacs.

  “I don’t see how you can conclude that, Barry.”

  “Of course they are! It all adds up. I’m marrying Bill, and Bill owes Jim and Steven money. And they’re afraid I’ll do to Bill what they enjoy thinking I did to Tom Weed – murder him, literally, or in effect – and I’ll get hold of Bill’s property, and they’ll never get their money back. They want to dig something up on me and scare me off. Or scare Bill off from marrying me. Now I get it! I’m right, aren’t I, Don?”

  This was getting complicated, though it all had an elegant simplicity to it, too. Fields’ description of events so far had a ring of truth to it lacking in Sturdivant’s ever increasingly hokey-sounding tale of compassionate concern for his and Gaudios’s – the toads – “dear friend” Bill Moore. But there was a large complicating factor in this unfolding saga, and that complicating factor looked more and more as if it was me.