Death Vows

by Richard Stevenson

  “If I can’t snap at you, then who can I snap at?”

  “You usually have a list.”

  “One other thing, Timothy. Bring my nine-millimeter. It’s in the bedroom closet.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “I think Sturdivant and Gaudios might have mob connections.”

  “Now, that makes me nervous.”

  “Me too. It’s nuts, but there’s this talk of leg-breaking – usually a giveaway. Gaudios told me he worked in financial services. That could mean loansharking, and I don’t mean the kind of loansharking Visa and MasterCard carry on legally with the enthusiastic endorsement of their dear friends in Congress. I mean the illegal mob kind. And Sturdivant’s family apparently has some kind of shady past in Pittsfield. I’ve got to check all that out.”

  “But,” Timmy said, “loansharking means extortionate interest rates. Sturdivant’s rates were actually lower than market. That doesn’t sound like the Mafia to me.”

  “And that’s the part of it that’s really screwy. But the other thing is, Sturdivant’s murder is looking more and more like a mob hit. So, if I’m getting into something here, I just want to be armed and alert.”

  “Do you think maybe Barry Fields crossed the mob in some way, and they’ve set him up to take the murder rap?”

  “Possibly.”

  “But what could his involvement have been. He’s just some gay-guy, movie-nut, theater employee, isn’t he? Is it Fields’ mysterious past that might be mob-connected?”

  “It could be. But a better bet is, he earned their enmity when he told an old lady to shut up, and this particular old lady was the mother of two men who weren’t used to having their mom get dissed.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I made a plan with Timmy to meet at Aroma, the restaurant where I was to dine with Ramona Furst at eight. Then I called Preston Morley and set up a lunch meeting on Saturday with him and his spouse, David Murano, in Pittsfield. Murano’s family was old Pittsfield, and he would likely know something about the nature of the Sturdivant family’s alleged shady past.

  I called Bill Moore’s cell phone and got no answer. I left this message: “Hi, Bill. This is Strachey. Did you work as a mob hit man when you lived in Washington? Or were you some kind of fed going after the mob? Or some combination of both? Clue me in. It would be awfully helpful.”

  I drove into Great Barrington in a steady stream of weekender traffic. It was Friday late afternoon, and the tourists and second-homers were still restless, even the weekend after Labor Day. I spotted Guido’s Market on the left, and the parking lot was jammed. I decided to have a look at the site of the wheel-of-cheese attack, and pulled in.

  As I drove around the lot searching for a vacant parking space, a dude in a Range Rover zoomed into a handicap space and bounded out of the car and into the market. He was not handicapped in any visible way, had no handicap sticker, and was wearing about ten thousand dollars worth of clothes. I found a vacant space in a far corner of the lot, parked, and made my way back to the Range Rover. With a ballpoint pen, I let the air out of all four tires. A Guido’s bagboy came up to me and asked me what I thought I was doing, and I explained. He said, “Cool,” and walked on.

  Twenty minutes later, back at The Brewery again, hot-tub borrower George Santiago was another noble-browed attractive fellow of thirty or so, a social worker employed by the state. He had no complaints about beautiful-genital effrontery – or didn’t mention them – and he was philosophical about Gaudios calling in Santiago ’s six thousand dollar loan to him. He had only about thirteen hundred dollars left to pay off, and he said his mother in Connecticut had agreed to lend it to him. I asked Santiago if he knew of other borrowers, and he named Treece but had heard of no others. I asked him if Gaudios had threatened him in any way.

  “No,” Santiago said. “Steven was actually apologetic when he called. He said he was so upset by Jim’s death that he was leaving the area, and that’s why he was asking that the loan be repaid. He said it was best if he cut all his ties here. That didn’t seem wise to me. He’s going to lose all his emotional support systems just when he needs them most.”

  “I’m not sure Steven had any emotional support systems beyond Jim Sturdivant. That’s what’s so awful for him. Where did he say he was going?”

  “ Ibiza. He said he and Jim had a house there.”

  “Not Palm Springs? He told me Palm Springs.”

  “No, I know it was Ibiza, because I know the island. My ex and I went there once and enjoyed it.”

  “So you’re single, George?”

  Santiago sipped his Coke. “Yeah, I’m actually a little man-shy at this point. I’ve had four relationships in six years that didn’t work out. I seem to have an unfortunate knack for ending up with Mister Wrong.”

  “I’ve seen that knack often enough. It’s like a pernicious virus that’s hard for some men to shake. And a lot of women, too.”

  “One guy was a boozer,” Santiago said. “Two were too young and immature, and one guy was so traumatized and depressed it was sometimes actually physically painful being around him. The depressed guy was almost five years ago, and apparently he’s doing better now. You must know him, in fact. It’s Barry Fields’ boyfriend.”

  “Bill Moore?”

  “We were together for about four months not long after he moved to the Berkshires. But it was heavy going. It’s a shame that after Bill pulled himself together and seemed to be doing well, his boyfriend – or fiancé, I guess you could say – has been accused of murder.”

  I said, “Bill is actually the person I’m working for, to clear Barry. I know of his depression. Did he tell you why he was depressed?”

  “That was part of the problem,” Santiago said. “He would never talk about it. His depression was so disabling, Bill could barely function. He found a job, and he got through that during the day. But after work he’d drink beer and watch sports on TV, and if he could stay awake long enough we’d make love with this incredible intensity. But that was it. Bill is an attractive man, and I wish things had gone differently with us. But he was just too closed up. And it wasn’t just intimacy issues, so-called. The guy really seemed to have been psychically wounded in some horrible way that he could never talk about. It was just so sad.”

  “Did he talk at all about his life in Washington? That’s where he apparently lived before coming to the Berkshires.”

  “Just in a general way. But I don’t even know what kind of work he did. Something official or semi-official. I do know that he gets a retirement pension that’s fairly substantial for someone who retired at such a young age – early or mid-forties.”

  “Did he receive checks in the mail?” I asked.

  “For a while, I think. We never actually lived together, but I slept over at his place often enough. I think he went to direct deposit at some point, but I do remember seeing these envelopes from the United States Treasury. And I assumed they were Bill’s retirement checks.”

  “Because they were government checks and they were addressed to William Moore?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Bill ever say he worked for the FBI?” I asked Santiago.

  “No, he never said. If he mentioned his pre-Berkshires life at all – and he seldom did – Bill just said he had left all that behind. He said he wanted to start his life over and get it right this time. He did say that a couple of times. He said coming up to the Berkshires was his chance to do things right and not fuck up this time.”

  “George, did Bill ever refer to any violence in his past life? Violence that he did, or that was done to him?”

  Santiago looked uneasy. “Why? Do you think Bill might have had something to do with Jim Sturdivant’s murder?”

  “Not necessarily. Anyway, the guy is my own client. I wouldn’t be working for him if I thought he was involved in a murder.”

  Santiago looked at me peculiarly, and if I had been looking at me I would have looked at me peculiarly, too.

  He said, “
Jean Watrous is the person to talk to about Bill. They were friends in DC, and she’s closer to him and knows more about him than anybody, I think.”

  Something occurred to me, and I wrapped things up quickly with Santiago. I thanked him for his perspective and wished him well paying off his loan to Gaudios in a timely way that would not lead to the need for hospitalization and several weeks in a wheelchair. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, and he said he wasn’t worried.

  In The Brewery parking lot, I phoned my FBI contact in Washington. Luckily, he had not left for the weekend – in fact, he said, he’d been working late and on most weekends since 9/11 – and I asked him about an FBI retiree named Jean Watrous. No more then two minutes later, I was told, yes, Jean Watrous was retired from the bureau. She had been an employee, assigned throughout her career to headquarters in Washington, from March, 1969 to January, 2002. I asked if she worked in the anti-mob-activities section of the FBI. My source said, no, Watrous had worked in counterterrorism.

  Timmy said, “You know, your name is Ramona, and we’re eating in a restaurant called Aroma. That’s almost an anagram.”

  “Yes,” Furst said. “Too bad my name isn’t Ramoa. Then it would be an anagram.”

  “You could change it,” Timmy said. “That seems to be what a lot of people do here in Massachusetts. People like Bud Radziwill and Barry Fields, your client.”

  Furst said, “And if you changed your name from Timothy Callahan to Malb Loovinda, that would be an anagram for what I’m about to order for dinner. God, I’m starved.”

  Timmy and I looked at each other, and both our lips moved.

  Aroma was on Main Street, just south of downtown. We had a booth that was private and remarkably quiet. Great Barrington on Friday night felt like SoHo or the Via Veneto on a weekend, with determinedly jolly diners and shoppers tramping up and down the small town’s streets by the hundreds or perhaps thousands. They came from all over, to what Furst said were Great Barrington’s many dozens of cafes and restaurants. Twenty years earlier, she said, “ethnic” food in Great Barrington meant pizza. Now, with the tourist and second-home boom, there was Japanese, Indian, Thai, even Finnish, and a couple of places that offered jazz, cocktails, and what Furst described as “high-priced grandmother food.”

  Before dinner, I had walked over to the Triplex, where the Friday-night throngs were descending on the place like hajjis at the Dome of the Rock. I spotted Myra Greene in the lobby surrounded by what looked like outraged and sympathetic admirers. They all but hoisted her on their shoulders and carried her around town like a Mexican saint at Candelaria, Santa Myra de la Cinema. It looked like a crowd that could have hanged Thorne Cornwallis in effigy. Bud Radziwill had told me Cornwallis rarely ventured south of Pittsfield, and I could see why.

  In our cozy retreat, Furst said, “This is so nice, eating here, even if we’re going to talk business. Shall we share a lamb vindaloo, another meat dish and a veggie dish? Or is either of you vegetarian?”

  I said, “Timothy eats nothing that casts a shadow larger than Mount Washington. Otherwise, we’re happy carnivores.”

  “My thirteen-year-old is vegan,” Furst said. “It gets complicated in the kitchen. And when I’m in a place like this, I tend to pounce on the odd steer or fowl running loose and plunge my fork into it.”

  Timmy said, “You must be good in a courtroom.”

  “I am,” Furst said. She was still in her courthouse dark business outfit, and she hadn’t unwound all the way, despite the dent she had made in her whiskey sour.

  I said, “You have kids. And a husband too?”

  “Two kids, Jessica, thirteen, and Howie, eleven. My ex has them this weekend. They’re great. It makes some other things about the marriage okay to forget about.”

  I saw now that Furst’s lustrous auburn hair might not have been nature’s own shade, and I wondered why most women who colored their hair usually looked fresh and new, and men who did it, no matter who they were, usually came across as Dick Clark.

  Timmy said, “How long were you married, Ramona?”

  “Too long,” she said and caught the eye of the waiter, a somber man of late middle age who looked as if he could have been a professor of accounting in Jalalabad. We ordered an assortment of zesty savories.

  “Thanks for turning over your Friday night to us,” I told Furst. “To us and to Barry Fields. I’m sure you’d rather be out on a date, taking your mind off all this.”

  “I’m actually not dating right now,” Furst said. “I’m just coming out of a relationship with a woman who was too high maintenance, and I’m taking a break from all that.”

  Timmy said, “Oh, you’re gay?”

  “Bi,” Furst said and dipped a celery stick in some tamarind sauce. “I like men, too, if they meet certain criteria.”

  “Like, if they have large breasts?” Timmy said jocularly, and to my relief Furst laughed.

  “No, Timothy. I go for men with really nice asses. Like Don’s here. You’re a little skinnier than I generally go for. But you are pretty cute otherwise.”

  “Timmy’s bi, too,” I said. “Bipolar. Would that do?”

  “Been there, done that,” Furst said. “No, what I look for in a man is a shred of decency. And it constantly amazes me how often I find it.”

  “Why is that so surprising?” I asked gingerly.

  “Too many men are so angry. It’s as if they resent not being able to spend their time roaming the forests spearing things. It’s women who more often have reasons to be mad as hell, but most women take life as it comes. It’s always a relief to find a man who’s like a woman in that regard.”

  “But has an ass like Don’s,” Timmy said.

  “Now you’re talkin’.”

  I said, “Your client seems to be one of those angry men. Barry Fields is full of rage, but I don’t think it’s because he isn’t allowed to go hunting.”

  “No,” Furst said. “And it’s not the anger of a gay man who’s still stewing over being forced to conform and date Debbie Dewdrop in junior high. It’s more than that. I don’t know exactly what Barry’s problem is, but I feel certain he came out of some horrendous family situation.”

  “He won’t talk about it to anybody,” I said. “Except apparently Bill Moore and Bud Radziwill. Have you heard from Moore?”

  “No. There was just a message he left in my office saying he’d be back in town for the dangerousness hearing on Monday. I asked Radziwill about Barry’s anger after the altercation in Guido’s on Wednesday – I was looking for some mitigating circumstances for the blow-up – and Bud just said Barry’s whole family is like that, and Barry is actually the calmest, least dangerous person in his whole brood.”

  “Where did the two of them meet?” I asked. “Bud the phony Kennedy cousin has his own mysterious past, and I wonder if the key to Barry’s troubled history lies with Bud’s.”

  “They met in college or just before college,” Furst said. “Bud told me that much. When I asked him where that was, he just said ’the Emerald City,’ and laughed. He wouldn’t tell me any more. Bud would only say that they weren’t wanted by the law anywhere, and not to worry about that.”

  Timmy said, “They must have followed the yellow brick road.”

  We looked at him.

  “To the Emerald City.”

  I said, “I’ll bet you’re right, Timothy. But what does that mean? As a practical matter.”

  He looked blank. He brightened then and said, “Maybe they’re from Kansas.”

  “Bud sounds as if he’s from Texas,” I said.

  “So maybe they didn’t follow the yellow brick road. They took I-10.”

  Our assorted meat platter arrived, and we helped ourselves to the aromatic morsels.

  Furst told me she had arranged my visit with Fields at the Berkshire County House of Correction in Pittsfield Saturday morning at ten. “But,” she said, “I’m not sure what you’re going to get out of Barry that’ll be of any use. He claims not
to have known Jim Sturdivant well enough to have any idea who would want to kill him, and I tend to believe him. Sturdivant and Gaudios were both icky guys, but the kind that inspire annoyance rather than homicide. I take it you’ve checked out the guys who borrowed money from Jim at below market rates in return for blowjobs. Anything there?”

  Timmy examined his mint sauce. I said no, I hadn’t come up with anything, except Gaudios, as co-lender, had called in the loans within the last two days, and this had upset some of the borrowers. I said, “Ramona, doesn’t Sturdivant’s murder look to you a bit like a mob hit? I’m talking methodology.”

  She said, “It does. I wondered about that.”

  “What do you know about Sturdivant’s background? I mean, before he became a precious Sheffield homosexual.”

  “I don’t know anything, really. He’s from Pittsfield. I grew up in Lowell. I came out here to be a post-hippie and somehow ended up in law school. So Pittsfield is relatively new to me. And Gaudios is from… where?”

  “ Springfield, someone said.”

  “A sad town. Pittsfield is an old industrial city that’s trying to make a comeback with cultural tourism and the quality of life that comes with the natural surroundings. Springfield is an old industrial city that’s been sinking for decades and has nothing to grab on to. Gaudios is lucky to have fled when he did.”

  I said, “I want to check out if Sturdivant and Gaudios might have had mob ties. Unlikely as that sounds. They used lending money not for profit but for sex with otherwise unattainable attractive men – a kind of ugly twist on loansharking. The murder looks like a gangland hit job. And Gaudios told me he made his money in what he called financial services, though he was adamant in not explaining to me what that meant.”

  Furst said, “Half the people in the United States work in financial services now. It’s what the country produces these days instead of widgets.”

  “And the other thing is,” I said, “Sturdivant’s family in Pittsfield has some kind of shady past. I’m going up there tomorrow to find out what that’s all about.”