Death Vows

by Richard Stevenson

  I said, “And no other shots were fired?”

  “Just the five nine-millimeters,” Toomey said.

  “Did anyone hear the gunfire?” I said. “There are all these houses nearby.”

  “Several people did hear the shots,” Toomey said, “and phoned the county emergency dispatcher just after nine. Officers in a patrol car from the Lee barracks arrived at nine forty but, finding the neighborhood calm, left the scene. The neighbors have been interviewed, and none of them saw anybody arrive at or depart the Sturdivant home at the time of the gunfire. The shooter may have parked a block away and cut through back yards.”

  “I suppose your forensics guys have checked the yards,” I said.

  “Yeah, you can suppose that.”

  “Did I see a swimming pool out back there? And a hot tub?”

  Gaudios said, “Anybody going through the yard would see the pool. We’ve got floodlights with motion sensors back there. And the pool is fenced in. We’ll be… we would have been… I’ll have to close the pool soon. We start getting leaves this time of year.” He got teary again, and I thought about what my life would be like without Timothy Callahan, and then I pushed that thought out of my head.

  I said, “The circumstances of this shooting don’t look to me like anger or pique – the kind of mayhem you’d expect if an amateur like Barry Fields went bonkers after a fight in a grocery store. This looks like an assassination. Professional almost. The killer walked in, shot Sturdivant and the dog, and walked out again.

  “How do you know Fields is an amateur?” Toomey said.

  I had no answer to that. For all any of us knew, six years earlier Fields could have worked for a Columbian drug cartel or the Pakistani intelligence services. I said, “Does anyone know if Fields owned a gun?”

  “He never registered one. But in your line of work you must know about the ready availability of illegal firearms, Mr. Strachey. It’s like shopping for a leaf blower. Maybe easier. Certainly cheaper.”

  “I do know.”

  “No, Barry Fields is definitely our prime suspect. He attacked Jim Sturdivant earlier in the day yesterday, and he threatened to get rid of him, according to witnesses. And his flight pretty much nails it, to my way of thinking. I appreciate your wanting to earn your fee from Bill Moore. But you’re pushing against the obvious here.”

  “What about Sturdivant’s business and personal life? Isn’t there anybody else who might have had it in for him?”

  This got Gaudios’s prompt attention, but he said nothing.

  Toomey said, “Mr. Sturdivant has been retired from the business world for four years. According to Mr. Gaudios, he didn’t have an enemy in the world and has pretty much devoted his life to performing good deeds for friends and charities.”

  “But,” I said, “you must have spoken to Bill Moore. I know for a fact that his opinion of Jim Sturdivant was more critical. Maybe there were others who also thought ill of Jim.”

  Gaudios’s face tightened, and Toomey gave me a bemused look that told me something I needed to know. So, I thought, Toomey knows about the loans and probably about the conditions. And Gaudios knows Toomey knows, and now they both know that I know that they both know.

  “Don’t you worry, Mr. Strachey, that we’ll miss one single important angle,” Toomey said. “This crime was committed just last night, and my investigation has just begun. And now that we’ve met and I see what a solid professional you are, I’m going to want to count on you to share your skills and judgment and professionalism with those of us employed to solve this crime for the people of Massachusetts. Can I count on you?”

  “You sure can, detective. I’m at your service. Yours and Thorny’s.”

  Expressionless, Toomey studied me closely, and Steven Gaudios stood looking bereft and apprehensive.

  Chapter Eight

  Bill Moore’s house was set up on a hillside on the east side of Great Barrington, separated from the business district by the Housatonic River. The Housatonic’s pretty but modest flow would be labeled a creek or brook in New York State and most others, but in New England every topographical dribble was called a river, part of the region’s quirky old-country charm. Moore ’s white, wood-frame two-story house was identical to millions of others in the woodier regions of North America, and it was barely visible behind a profusion of bushes and trees. It seemed to be the abode of someone who preferred privacy or even anonymity, or maybe he just found it pleasant.

  I parked in the driveway behind a beige Honda, climbed up six or eight steps, and rang the doorbell. There were some old green wicker chairs on the porch, but they looked dusty and unused. The door swung open.

  “Donald Strachey?”

  “Yep. Bill Moore?”

  “Come on in.”

  I saw why Fields had gone for a man twenty years older than he was. Moore was impressive to behold, with a middleweight college wrestler’s build and a green-eyed George Bellows-painting athlete’s mug. He had close-cropped light hair with some gray in it and rings of sleeplessness around his watchful eyes. Barefoot in old khakis and a faded red T-shirt, Moore carried just enough of an incipient paunch to suggest that although he liked to keep fit, he was not fetishistic about it.

  “Have a seat,” Moore said. “Did you eat?”

  “Had a sandwich in the car. Thanks.”

  The living room looked disconcertingly like a straight guy’s bachelor pad, with a lot of nondescript black leather seating, most of it facing a TV set the size of a stadium scoreboard. The floor was not littered with Budweiser dead soldiers, but there was an empty pizza box on the coffee table. The only sign that homosexuals as we generally think of them might have lived here was a bookshelf against one wall that was stuffed with movie and movie-lore titles. There were screenplays, biographies of stars and directors, picture books, plus history and criticism, including what looked like the complete Pauline Kael. I guessed these belonged to Barry Fields, and wherever he had fled to – Colorado? Waziristan? upstairs? – he had not taken his movie books with him.

  I said, “I was just down in Sheffield and met Detective Toomey at the crime scene.”

  “Good. You’re getting right to work. I’m reassured already.”

  “Toomey seems single-minded but not bull-headed. He’s after Barry, but if we can show that Barry could not have shot Sturdivant, Toomey is smart enough to grasp it. Don’t you think?”

  Sitting across from me, Moore sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know about Toomey. He might be okay. It’s Thorne Cornwallis, the DA, I’m worried about. He’s unimpressed by facts if they look like they’ll get in the way of a slam-dunk prosecution. Anyway, proving that Barry did not do the shooting will be tough. He has no alibi, and he could have done it. Except he didn’t. For one thing, Barry has no gun. Barry hates guns.”

  “Do you own a firearm, Bill?”

  He looked at me and shrugged. “I do. Detective Toomey asked me that too. It’s a Glock-nine. It could have been the murder weapon. I keep it in the bedroom closet. When Toomey was here, I produced the weapon, and he took it in for analysis. It’ll come back clean, so we don’t have to worry about that.”

  I said, “How come you own a gun? Great Barrington doesn’t feel much like Dodge.”

  “I lived in DC for eleven years. It’s a dangerous place. A woman was shot in the lobby of my building. Killed for the eight dollars in her handbag.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Where I lived?”

  “Yeah. I know DC a little. I like it. I like its cosmopolitan-ness. Even though it’s a cosmopolitan city that’s basically run by people from Kansas.”

  Moore seemed momentarily startled when I said this, though at the time I had no idea why.

  He said, “I lived in the Dupont Circle area, New Hampshire near Eighteenth. Very gay, even though I was not very out at the time. That took a while longer.” Remembering this, Moore looked sad.

  “You retired from the federal government early, I was told.”

/>   “Five years ago, yeah.”

  “Which agency?”

  “That’s another life.”

  “I think Jim Sturdivant said you worked for the Commerce Department.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Did you and Barry meet in DC?”

  “No, we met after I moved up here.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Moore sat looking at me, and then he seemed to realize he was talking like an anxious man with something to hide. He perked up a little and said, “I was attracted to Barry, but I thought he was Tom Weed’s boyfriend. Do you know about Tom?”

  I nodded.

  “So it wasn’t until Tom died that I made my move. And it turned out that Barry was attracted to me all along, but he had thought I wasn’t interested. We wasted a lot of time, but we finally got it right. We got it very right, in fact. I was never so happy or sure of anything in my whole life. And then you came along.” He looked at me, waiting for me to justify or explain my despicable interference.

  I said, “Yes, Bill, I was hired by Sturdivant to check Barry out – because, Sturdivant told me, he was concerned that Barry was going to rip you off in some way. It sounded like a plausible enough story at the time.”

  Moore leaned back and snorted. “What shit.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Barry told me Sturdivant told you I was his good buddy. But Barry told you the truth – what my real relationship was with Jim.”

  “He did.”

  “I only knew Sturdivant socially and didn’t particularly like him or Gaudios. But I borrowed forty thousand dollars from Jim at a better rate than I could have gotten at any bank. He offered this to me, ‘as a friend,’ he said at the time. The exact nature of the ‘friendship’ didn’t become apparent until the day I went over to pick up the check – after I’d already signed the purchase agreement on this house.” Moore shook his head dolefully.

  “And then it was into the hot tub, with Jim and Steven?”

  “It was never spelled out,” Moore said. “But when Jim said he’d give me the check after we relaxed a bit in the tub, and why didn’t I get naked, I knew immediately what was going on. My first impulse was to laugh, and my second impulse was to tell the toads to go fuck themselves. And then I thought, hell, what a quick and easy and totally uncomplicated way to knock half a point in interest off a major loan.”

  I said, “What with Alan Greenspan not being available to do his bit.”

  “So I asked, will I have to do this more than once? And Jim said, no, not unless you have such a wonderful time you want to come back for more. So – what the hell.”

  “And you climbed in, and then you just closed your eyes and thought of… not England. Where are you from originally, Bill?”

  “The Midwest. So anyway, I saved myself a few thousand dollars that day. And, I can tell you, it wasn’t the most humiliating thing I’ve ever done sexually.”

  “We all have our stories.”

  “And then, of course, I found out later that I wasn’t the only borrower with an unwritten hot tub clause in my contract. There are four other guys, and I’ll bet more.”

  “May I have their names? They could be considered possible suspects in the murder. You don’t seem especially angry about the loan conditions, just mildly disgusted. But some people might get rattled by treatment like this, or even unhinged. Then there’s the question of repayment of the loan. I take it you’re not off the hook, and neither are the other borrowers. Or are you?”

  “I assume I now owe thirty-four thousand three hundred dollars to Jim’s estate. I certainly don’t plan to welch on the loan. I don’t know about the other guys. You’d have to ask them.”

  I said, “What was Barry’s reaction to the hot-tub incident?”

  “He was grossed out, naturally. But this was before we were together. I told him later.”

  “Detective Toomey didn’t say anything, but I got the impression he knows about Sturdivant’s lending practices. Was it you who filled him in?”

  “You bet I did. I wanted him to know what kind of human being Jim Sturdivant was. I said if Sturdivant would pull crap like that, then he might be into all kinds of shit, and why were the cops just looking at Barry and not at anybody else?”

  “What was Toomey’s reaction?”

  “He didn’t seem all that interested. He never even asked me for the names of the other borrowers. I think I did get the point across that Sturdivant was a scumbag. But I got the impression that Toomey expected gay people to do all kinds of weird sexual stuff, and this was just par for the course, and he didn’t really want to look into it or even think about it. A lot of people in law enforcement are like that. You must have noticed this, being in your line of work.”

  “I have, though in my experience there are fewer homophobes in the criminal justice system than there used to be. Albany has a long history of bigoted cops, and yet today the police chief is a PFLAG dad. Have you ever worked in law enforcement, Bill?”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  “You know guns. You slide right into cop terminology.”

  Moore laughed. “These days everybody uses cop language. It’s all those CSI shows. I think it’s funny.”

  “So you used to be in the police?”

  “Not exactly. But I don’t wish to talk about my past. With you or with anyone else.” His face flushed, and he looked at me hard.

  “How come?”

  “It’s not nice. We’ll have to let it go at that.”

  I said, “Is Barry’s past not nice too? Barry did not officially exist prior to six years ago.”

  “You’d have to ask Barry about that.”

  “Surely you know Barry’s life story. You’re planning on marrying the guy.”

  “It’s not for me to tell. But this I can say. I’m telling you, Strachey, that Barry’s past is totally irrelevant to the Sturdivant situation.”

  “And Bud Radziwill, so-called. He only came into existence when Barry did. What’s that about? You guys are three awfully mysterious fellows. Am I being yanked around here in some unfortunate way? I’m starting to have a nauseating feeling about all of this and about all of you.”

  Moore thought hard about something for a long moment, and if he was getting the impression he might be losing me, that was fine. Because he was. Then he said, “I understand your frustration, Strachey. In fact, I’ve been there. Look, here’s the thing. I’m going to confide in you. This goes no farther than this room, right? Are you capable of discretion? I think you are. You must be bound by some kind of professional ethics.”

  “Some kind, yes. But just spit it out, and then I’ll tell you which ethics might apply. It’s yours I’m worried about.”

  “The thing is, I was FBI. Twenty-one years. Ten in the field, eleven at the bureau.”

  “I see.”

  “I prefer to keep this quiet.”

  “Why?”

  “People expect you to think and behave in a certain way. I don’t want that. I’m out of that.”

  I said, “I know Great Barrington is some kind of hotbed of anti-Bush sentiment. There’s an equestrian statue of Dennis Kucinich as you ride into town. But you were a professional.

  Most people respect that, even if they don’t like the politically appointed doofuses, no? Or is that not what you mean?”

  Moore slumped back in his chair, raised his muscular arms, and put his big hands behind his head. He squeezed his eyes shut. He said, “I made some mistakes. I don’t want to go into it.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “It’s just… hard.”

  “Were you fired?”

  “No. I resigned. Retired.”

  “So it’s nothing criminal.”

  He seemed to ponder this and said nothing.

  I asked, “Does Toomey know about this?”

  “No. It’s not relevant.”

  “Does Barry know?”

  “Sure. It’s one of the things we have in common. We’re different
in a lot of ways. I’m older. I like computers and sports. Barry likes movies. But we both like the Berkshires, and the big thing is, we can understand each other because we both have pasts we want to forget.”

  “Can you tell me what Barry’s past is that he wants to leave behind?”

  Moore looked at me now and said, “Sorry, no. I swore I’d never tell a soul. Barry would be very, very upset.”

  “He does have a temper. You told me on the phone that Barry came by his hot temper honestly. What did you mean by that?”

  Moore seemed to consider his reply, and said, “Just that he comes from a long line of hotheads.”

  “Uh huh. And what set off the confrontation in Guido’s market yesterday?”

  “Don’t act surprised when I tell you it was you and your investigation you were doing for the toads – for Jim and Steven. Barry told me about his confrontation with you on Tuesday night after your dinner at Pearly Gates. Barry vented, and we smoked a joint, and he seemed to get over it. But then on Wednesday he ran into Jim and Steven in Guido’s, and he got mad all over again. Jim got Barry going with some bullshit about protecting his loan, and then he really set Barry off by saying that he was looking out for my interests by protecting me from Barry. Unfortunately, a big piece of cheese was within reach, and Barry threw it at Jim. It’s not a serious weapon, but under the law, assault is assault.”

  I said, “Has Barry hit people before?”

  Moore thought this over. “I don’t think so. He’s really not a violent person, despite his anger. His occasional rage tends to come out verbally.”

  “What is Barry angry about?” I asked.

  Moore said, “If I could tell you that – which I can’t – you’d never believe it. Not in a million years.”

  Chapter Nine

  I parked downtown off Main Street and made some calls from the car. I set up meetings with two of the four hot-tub borrowers – two others I was unable to reach – and with Bud Radziwill. I also arranged to meet Fields’ boss at the movie theater, Myra Greene, a woman Moore said Fields was close to. I needed to (a) track down Fields and get his complete story – it seemed too far-fetched that the Sturdivant shooting was totally unrelated to Fields’ altercation with him on the same day – and (b) get a clearer picture of the toads’ lives and anybody else who might have wanted Jim dead. The circumstances of Sturdivant’s death suggested not rage but calculation, and I needed to find out why that was so.