Death Vows

by Richard Stevenson

  With Barry out of the room, the judge looked through some papers and said, “Might the defendant be referring to this matter of aiding a fugitive that I’m to hear next? It seems that way.” He looked from Cornwallis to Furst and back again. Furst sat shaking her head.

  “That would appear to be the case, your honor.” Cornwallis said. “Myra Greene aided Barry Fields in his flight from the law. This is, as your honor knows well, a class-B felony. We intend to prosecute Mrs. Greene, and her arraignment is on the docket for this morning.”

  The judge said, “And you’ve got her back there in the lockup? This eighty-nine-yearold woman?”

  “Judge, the commonwealth does not, of course, plan to oppose bail for Mrs. Greene. We don’t see her as a serious flight risk.”

  “No,” the judge said. “Myra Greene on the lam I would have a hard time imagining.”

  Now Ramona Furst asked to speak. She said she believed that Fields was understandably upset to see his good friend needlessly in chains, and she was sure he would observe courtroom decorum after Mrs. Greene was released.

  “Are you suggesting that your client should determine the court’s schedule?” the judge asked.

  “No, your honor. I’m only trying to do what will work for the court and for all of us.”

  The judge considered this and said, “Mrs. Greene’s case is another matter. I have to say, I’m amazed that it seemed necessary for this eighty-nine-yearold woman to be dragged in here as if she were Khalid Sheik Mohammed. But your client, Ms. Furst, is another case. His recent actions, from his flight to his outburst just now, show that he is not rational and is not in control of himself. So I am granting the commonwealth’s request for a dangerousness hearing before I consider any bail request. I’ll order that hearing for Monday morning. Meanwhile, Mr. Fields will remain in custody at the County House of Correction. For the record, how will Mr. Fields plead?”

  “Not guilty, your honor.”

  “Monday morning at nine, then,” the judge said and gestured for Furst to move on.

  I wanted to see what kind of horrors Cornwallis had in mind for Myra Greene, but I needed to talk to Furst, and I followed her and her assistant out the door and onto the courthouse steps while Radziwill and Josh stayed behind. A ragtag mob of print and television newshounds came at her, and I stood aside while Furst declared Fields innocent and the victim of a prosecution based on no evidence at all. She said Fields’ flight and courtroom behavior were the actions not of an irrational man but of a rational and justifiably angry young man, and she was sure that the court would agree with her on Monday.

  As Furst turned to go back inside, I got her attention and told her I was the investigator Bill Moore had hired.

  Furst said, “Where is Bill, anyway? Do you have any idea? I can’t get hold of him.”

  “I don’t know, but we should talk. I’ve been on this for twenty-four hours, and I’m spinning my wheels.”

  “I’m not getting a whole lot of traction either,” Furst said, “thanks in part to a client who won’t tell me anything about anybody. He does insist that he didn’t shoot Jim Sturdivant, which I happen to believe. But we need to do three things, Donald. Show that Barry could not have done the crime, which won’t be easy with no alibi. Show that Barry had no motive for shooting Sturdivant – some bullshit argument over Sturdivant hiring you to investigate Barry doesn’t cut it. And, if we can, show who had a better motive for killing Sturdivant. As I see it, that last part’ll be your job. Are you up to it?”

  “Sure,” I said, responding more to an organized, attractive and assured woman’s sense of clear mission than to any sense that I had any clue as to what to do next.

  “Good,” Furst said. “Call me later this afternoon with what you’ve got, and maybe we can do a late dinner. I’ll give you all I know, which is next to nothing.”

  She gave me her cell number, then headed back toward the courthouse to consult with her volatile client.

  I yelled after Furst, “Are you representing Myra Greene, too?”

  “She doesn’t want a lawyer,” Furst yelled back, “but Groesbeck will appoint one. Don’t worry about Myra. Thorny may have met his match with this woman.” Furst hurried into the courthouse, dragging her briefcase full of bullion.

  Curious as I was to witness Myra Greene’s arraignment, I decided my time would be better spent concentrating on Jim Sturdivant and deciphering who might have wanted him dead. One of the hot-tub borrowers? That seemed increasingly unlikely, though I was obliged to check them all out. And while nobody I met seemed to like the guy, neither did Sturdivant inspire murderous hatred. Most people just thought the toads were icky. Except for Barry Fields, who despised Sturdivant. The more I saw of Fields and the more I learned about him, the more his raw rage was apparent. What was he so angry about? And could that rage turn even more violent than it had in the cheese section at Guido’s? And then there was Man of Mystery Bill Moore. Where had he disappeared to, anyway?

  No sooner had I asked myself that question than someone showed up with the answer. A broad-faced middle-aged woman with soft gray eyes that matched her short hair had been seated in the courtroom. Now she came out the door and down the steps and approached me.

  “Bud Radziwill tells me you’re Don Strachey, the investigator,” the woman said. “I’m Bill’s friend Jean Watrous. I have a message for you from Bill.”

  “Let me guess. He can’t do lunch.”

  She smiled. “That’s right. How did you know?”

  “Bill has a way of missing appointments. Like court dates for his fiancé. Where is he, anyway?”

  Her look darkened now. “He’s in Washington. He’ll be back in a day or two, and he asked me to tell you he’d be in touch. He said for you to just to go ahead with your investigation of Jim Sturdivant. And if you have expenses beyond the retainer Bill has given you, you can come to me.”

  I said, “What’s Bill doing in Washington? Is he checking out other assassins like himself who might have had something to do with the murder?”

  Watrous reddened and glared at me. “What do you know about Bill’s history?”

  I said, “Plenty,” thinking the lie might elicit some actual useful information about Moore. Wrong again.

  Watrous snapped, “That’s horrible! You are just… horrible!” With that, she turned and strode away without another word.

  Chapter Twelve

  I needed to know more about Moore, but even more than that, I needed to know more about Sturdivant and Gaudios. I waited ten minutes for DA Cornwallis and his claque to emerge from the courthouse. While Cornwallis orated and struck Kim Jong Il-like poses for the TV cameras, I caught Joe Toomey’s eye and he came over.

  “How’s it going, Strachey? Did you catch the real killer yet, like OJ?”

  “I’m flummoxed, Joe. I admit it. How about yourself? Have you come up with any forensic or other genuine evidence besides the pathetic circumstantial crap that Thorny is retailing to a credulous public over there?”

  “No, but what we’ve got is good for a conviction. Don’t get me wrong, though. If you or anybody else can come up with a better candidate for a two-hour guilty verdict on this, I’m all ears. But you haven’t and you won’t. I haven’t located anybody who really loved Sturdivant except his boyfriend and his mother. But I haven’t heard of anybody who hated him enough to kill him either – or would have anything to gain by making him dead.”

  “Who’s in his will?” I asked. “Sturdivant was a wealthy man.”

  “Half of the estate goes to Gaudios, who’s already got some big bucks of his own. Anyway, his bridge-club alibi checks out. The rest of the estate is divided among Sturdivant’s aged mother, who gets a million and a half, and then local arts organizations, the state Republican Party, and the local Boy Scouts council.”

  “There’s your answer, Joe. Find out who’s in charge of the budget for the Scouts, and see if he’s got an alibi for Wednesday night. It’s a cunning move on the Scouts’ part. Bulk u
p the treasury, and rid the world of another fag in the process.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “The Scouts do a lot of good, you know.”

  “I do know. I used to be one.”

  “Both of my sons are Scouts. They get a lot out of it.”

  “Well,” I said, “I hope neither of them is gay, or he’d be tossed out on his ass.”

  Toomey looked at me steadily and said, “One of them is gay. Gary. He’s fifteen. He’s trying to decide whether or not to come out and challenge the Scouts’ national no-gays policy – which the Supreme Court already upheld as being legal, since the Scouts are a private organization. Or, he might stay closeted until he’s out of the Scouts, because he enjoys it so much. Whatever he decides to do, I told him, I’ll support him. His mother said the same thing. And his brother and three sisters, too.”

  Never assume. I said, “A lucky kid, your son is.”

  “It’s hard. Pittsfield is a conservative city, strait-laced, historically blue-collar, very Catholic. He goes to church and gets this garbage from the priests. Gary would be smart to wait until he’s away at college to come out. That would be easier. But we’ll see. He’s torn.”

  I said, “Jim Sturdivant is from Pittsfield originally. Do you know his family?”

  “Not really. His mother is Mount Carmel. We’re Sacred Heart. And we’ve only lived in Pittsfield for five years.”

  I recalled something Preston Morley said, and asked, “Have you ever heard anything about something shady in Sturdivant’s family history? Someone who knows Pittsfield said there might be something there.”

  Toomey shook his head. “Sometimes I think everybody in Pittsfield ’s got something shady in their past. But that’s just a cop’s cynicism talking. You see a lot.”

  I said, “I know you know about Sturdivant’s loans-for-sex hobby.”

  “It’s disgusting,” Toomey said, and looked ill.

  “I’m checking out the borrowers.”

  “Good for you. If you come up with anything, let me know. I’ll be interested.”

  “But why,” I asked, “aren’t you looking at other avenues in this? Sturdivant has a long history of all kinds of connections with all kinds of people – corporate, social, charitable, and who knows what all. He was a man who got around and who liked to influence people and events. People I’ve talked to have used words like controlling and manipulative when describing Sturdivant. My own experience with him bears that out. This is a guy who could well have made some serious enemies along the way, and you’re ignoring that.”

  Toomey looked as if he was about to choose his words with care. “Two things. One is, Thorny and the CPCU guys like Barry Fields for this. Okay?”

  “I see.”

  “Thorny is both an elected official who never gets less than seventy percent of the vote, and he is very old Pittsfield, very old Democratic machine. This is the reality.”

  “Uh huh.” I glanced over at the DA, still doing his Kim Jong Il act for the cameras.

  “The second thing is, I think Thorny is right on this one.”

  “Nah.”

  “You’re being naïve, Strachey. Fields is plainly unstable. He flies into rages. He once nearly lost his job at the Triplex for getting into a fight with a patron.”

  “Actual fisticuffs?”

  “A man complained about some talkers sitting behind him during a movie. Fields went in and told the people to shut up. They told him to fuck off, apparently, and he blew up and dragged two people outside, a man and a woman. For some reason, the couple took off and didn’t press charges, so there’s no record of it. But I have witnesses to the incident.”

  “Yes, he threw those blabby creeps out,” I said, “but he didn’t shoot them. Even though he probably should have. I would have.”

  Toomey got on his puzzled look again. “The point is, this is a guy who can lose control and you don’t know what the hell he’s going to do.”

  I said, “The person who shot Sturdivant seems to have been in total control of his actions. The act was calculated and it was deadly. It was not somebody losing it and popping off the way you’ve described Fields.”

  “Strachey, Fields told Sturdivant in front of three witnesses that he was going to get rid of him.”

  “That could have meant anything,” I said. “Get rid of him socially, or something.”

  This sounded painfully lame as I said it, and Toomey just looked at me for a long moment. He said, “Hey, I know you want to stick up for another gay guy. I appreciate that. And Fields has had some kind of rough time in his life, and you want to see that he gets a break. But you really have to face the facts here. I’m telling you. The guy lost it and killed a man, and now he has to suffer the consequences.”

  I said, “How do you know he had a rough time in life? What do you know about Fields’ life I don’t know about?”

  Toomey shrugged. “I just meant he was gay, and I know that’s not easy. As for who Fields actually is and where he came from, I’m still working on that.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  I thought about asking Toomey if he’d checked out Bill Moore’s whereabouts on Wednesday night at nine – or Moore’s murky background as possibly some kind of government agent – but decided not to implicate my own client unless and until the facts required it.

  Toomey left with the DA’s office crowd, and I waited a few more minutes until Myra Greene came out, accompanied by Radziwill and the two friends who had bailed her out. Radziwill helped her extract a cigarette from a pack in her side pocket, and then helped her light it.

  “Hey, Donald, I got sprung out of there just in time. I was about to go bonkers in the lockup and start screaming like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat.”

  “I just want you to know I didn’t rat you out, Myra.”

  “I know you didn’t, dear. That was Susie Schwartz, whose house I was looking after. But I don’t blame Susie either. Thorny went at her with a rubber hose, I’m sure.”

  Myra sounded game, but she was walking unsteadily and seemed unable to move her neck at all. I said, “Once we get Barry out of this, you’ll be okay, too. Don’t worry.”

  “Oh, I’m not concerned, Donald. Now, what time is it? I’ve got to back get to the theater.”

  “Don’t you want to get some rest first?”

  “No, dear, I’ll be getting plenty of rest when it’s my time for the – ” she glanced at her friends and then back at me ” – for the big you-know-what.”

  Then she wobbled away, trailing ash and fumes.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The first thing Jerry Treece said was, “Steven is calling in the loans.”

  “Can he do that? I thought Sturdivant was the lender.”

  “It’s in the contract I signed. If Sturdivant were to die, Gaudios would automatically take over as the lender. And the deal was, the loan could be called in on a week’s notice.”

  “That last part sounds kind of mob-like.”

  “It seemed like a bargain at the time,” Treece said resignedly and sipped from his own Sam Adams as I contemplated mine.

  We were in a place called The Brewery just north of town, where the potato skins were as rustic as the decor. Treece was a light-skinned black man in his thirties with a high forehead, a shiny beard and a sedate manner. He worked for a photography restoration company in nearby Housatonic and lived there with his partner, Greg.

  Treece said he’d met Sturdivant at the Supper Club and had heard from others that Sturdivant lent money at a below-market rate. Treece had heard rumors of the unwritten conditions of Sturdivant’s loans, but he said that that would not have been a problem unless it involved unsafe sex. And when the time came for Treece to collect the car loan he requested, the requirements were minimal and unobjectionable. His biggest problem, he said, was keeping from laughing when the dog had his martini.

  I asked, “How much did you borrow?”

  “Twelve thousand. But I’ve been paying it off in big chunks whenever I could, an
d I’m down to eighteen hundred. So Greg and I can get it together by next week without borrowing somewhere else. It was just kind of a shock, especially after what happened to Jim.”

  “And Gaudios just phoned you this morning and told you to pay up?”

  “He said a registered letter was in the mail, but he was just giving me a heads-up on what to expect.”

  “For some of the other borrowers, this is probably going to be a real problem,” I said. “Did Gaudios say what would happen if you didn’t pay the loan off within a week?”

  “He used the words ‘legal action.’ I told him to be cool, that I got the picture and I’d pay up. I told him I was very sorry to hear about Jim’s passing, and then Steven got weepy and said he and Jim had been together for forty-six years, and how was he going to live without him? He cried on the phone and said he didn’t think he could bear it. Both those guys were a couple of scuzzy characters in a lot of ways, but I do feel sorry for Steven. He’s totally devastated. Even people who are not very nice are capable of love, and in their weird way these guys had one of the solidest marriages around.”

  “I don’t think they were married,” I said. “In fact, Jim told me they were not – for family reasons, he said.”

  “They wore matching silver wedding bands,” Treece said. “I saw them.” He laughed and added, “They were the same design as their cock rings.”

  “Oh, goodness.”

  “Maybe they had a non-legal union ceremony and exchanged rings at that time.”

  “Could be,” I said. “Though I think not at Mount Carmel Church in Pittsfield, where Sturdivant’s mother is a parishioner. Maybe at their house.”

  Treece laughed at the idea of a gay union ceremony at Mount Carmel. “I don’t think Jim was even out with his family. Steven either. Everybody who was gay knew they were a couple, and so did a lot of other people down here in South County. But Pittsfield is another world. It’s a kind of gay pit of shame, where only the bravest of the brave come out. For instance, Jim and Steven gave a lot of money to arts organizations and charities, but they were never listed as joint donors. You’d see their names in theater programs as patrons, but unlike most gay couples these days they were always listed separately. It’s a schizoid kind of existence, and it has to take a toll on a person.”