“As soon as I check my appointment book. I have a busy schedule.”
“Meanwhile, let’s have lunch with somebody who might actually be forthcoming with useful information instead of acting cagey and evasive.”
Timmy said that sounded refreshing.
Preston Morley and David Murano lived in a pleasant, maple-shaded, two-family Edwardian frame heap on Gordon Street, not far from Pittsfield High School. Their side of the house had a yard sign for a candidate in the upcoming primary election, and the other side of the house had a sign for another candidate. The non-Morley-Murano section of the house also had a sign in the window that read Jesus is Coming Soon. It felt a little like Sunnis and Shias trapped in the same dwelling, though as Timmy and I walked up the porch steps a middle-aged woman emerged from the Shia side and offered a smile and a hearty “G’morning.”
Morley greeted us on the Sunni side and led us through rooms full of theatrical posters and memorabilia to the kitchen, where we met Murano, who was fixing lunch. He was large and dark-eyed, with a bushy black mustache, and the nimbleness of the dancer Timmy said he once had been. Morley, Timmy’s old classmate, was, like Timmy, not much changed from their track-and-field Georgetown days, except for their matching extensive bald spots. They chortled over their missing-hair situations, and Morley led us to the back porch, where a table had been laid with cheery care, including a centerpiece of many-colored nasturtiums from the flower garden below us. Here was the Massachusetts gay-marriage hell over which much of the nation was at that time clutching its head and recoiling in horror.
Once the gazpacho and green salad were served, and a few mildly racy Georgetown stories retold, Murano said, “I guess you want to hear about my cousin.”
What was this? “Your cousin?”
“Jim Sturdivant was a distant relative of mine. Though I hardly knew him. He was older, and anyway he left Pittsfield when he went to college, and he was really pretty much a South County second-homer until he retired. And even then he didn’t set foot in Pittsfield a whole lot, I don’t think.”
Morley added, “Miss Jimmy apparently would not have been welcomed by the other Sturdivants, who suspected that he was maybe a little bit that way.”
“Not that Jim’s that-way-ness was ever spoken of in the family,” Murano said.
I said, “It sounds as if Jim didn’t even speak of it himself, his being gay.”
“Within his circle of gay friends, yes. Outside that circle, never. I met a Whitney Defense Systems gay guy one time when I knew Jim was their company spokesman, and I asked the guy if he knew Jim. He did, and he was surprised to hear that Jim was gay. And he didn’t know anything about Steven, even though Jim and Steven had been together since college. It’s really sad, but I understand it because I grew up in Pittsfield too.”
Morley said, “ Pittsfield is the Paris of the Berkshires. Too bad it’s Paris, Illinois.”
Timmy said, “It’s a very pretty old city. I can see that part of its beauty, however, is its many fine Catholic churches. I know too well what that can mean.”
“It’s a priest-ridden old blue-collar city,” Murano said. “I still love the Catholic church for its esthetics and the decent parts of its morality and its history. And in some parts of the world the church is actually a force for social justice. But the church’s ideas on sexuality are soul-destroying, and Pittsfield is a poisonous place to grow up if you’re gay. Jim Sturdivant got out when he could, but not before he became so terrified and ashamed of his sexuality that it made him kind of bonkers – schizoid and twisted and with some kind of need to control and humiliate other gay men.”
Morley said, “I told David about Jim’s unusual lending practices.”
“How come you survived Pittsfield?” Timmy asked Murano. “I saw the rainbow sticker on your car, and I take it you two were licensed to be married at Pittsfield City Hall.”
“Let me explain,” Morley said, “just how unusual my husband is. David was the first teacher in a Pittsfield public school to come out, and that was twenty years ago. He was hugely popular and indispensible, so that helped. But this was before there were any serious legal protections, so it was a brave and gutsy thing to do. Not many gay teachers here are out. Either they’re afraid a bigoted parent will complain, and the school committee will be too gutless to back them up. Or they’re infected with the same shame and embarrassment Jim Sturdivant lived with. But far more are casually out now than was the case when David came out, and I just admire the hell out of them. The bravest people I know are gay men and women who stay in hometowns like Pittsfield where they grew up and simply refuse to live lives of secret shame and humiliation.”
Timmy said, “I never came out in Poughkeepsie. I snuck around until I got out of town.”
“I barely managed to come out in college,” I said. “Never mind back home.”
“I could never have done it back in West Gum Stump,” Morley said. “My Little League coach would have called me queer.”
Timmy said, “I didn’t know you played Little League, Preston. You never told me that. It’s not how I ever thought of you.”
“I’d go to ball practice and then go home and play my Ethel Merman records. This was known about me.”
Timmy said, “Ah, there’s my Preston.”
“In Pittsfield,” Murano said, “you would have kept your Ethel Merman habit carefully concealed. Or paid a heavy price. Or been afraid you would.”
Timmy raised a glass of limeade, and the rest joined in when he said, “To Pittsfield’s bravest!”
“Hear! Hear! To Pittsfield ’s bravest!”
“And then,” Murano said, setting his glass down, “in Jim Sturdivant’s case, there was this other problem.”
“It being?” I asked eagerly.
“Some of his family were criminals.”
“Uh huh.”
“Not just criminals, but the organized crime type. The old mainly Italian mob is pretty much out of the county now. It’s black gangs from New York that deal drugs. But when I was growing up – and especially when Jim was young – there was the numbers racket, card games, protection, some prostitution, and the big one, racetrack betting. There’s still some of that that goes on, a lot of sports betting especially.”
Timmy said, “Not to be too careless with an ethnic stereotype, but Sturdivant doesn’t sound to me like much of a Mafia family name.”
Murano said, “No, but Murano does.”
“Jim changed his name?”
“Phil Murano, Anne Marie’s first husband, was Jim’s father. The guy was a low-level mob goon. He was convicted in a loansharking crackdown in the late forties and was sent to Walpole, where he was stabbed to death in a brawl in 1951. Anne Marie married Mel Sturdivant a couple of years later, and she changed her name and the kids’ names to Sturdivant.”
Timmy said, “Loansharking. Hmm.”
“Jim had a hard time growing up,” Murano went on, “because people in Lakewood – the neighborhood over near the GE plant where we all lived then – knew his real dad was a mobster. Some people held it against him and Michael and even Rose, and other people took the other tack and expected Jim to be a tough, mean guy too. Which very definitely was not in the cards. Jim was choir and drama club material and a disappointment to both the Muranos and Sturdivants who were into sports and heavy betting. Luckily, Michael turned out to be ‘all boy,’ as I remember my mother’s aunts calling him, so that took some of the pressure off Jim. But Jim went off to UMass right after high school, and he never really came back to Pittsfield to live. Also, he met Steven in college, and back then neither the Muranos nor the Sturdivants would have put up with that.”
I said, “None of this is mentioned in the newspaper obit. I don’t mean the mob stuff or the gay thing. But the omission of the legal father seems odd.”
Murano laughed. “The family provides that type of information to the funeral home, which gives it to the paper. Anne Marie, Michael and Rose apparently chose to leave it
out. And since the Eagle was bought by a penny-pinching chain, turnover has been so high that the paper has no institutional memory. You could list Ma Joad as one of somebody’s survivors on an obit form, or Buffalo Bill Cody, and some hapless kid working for minimum wage over there would just type it up.”
I said, “David, tell me more about the brother, Michael. The one who was ‘all boy.’”
“I don’t know that much about Michael. He’s five or six years younger than Jim was – Rose is in between – and he left
Pittsfield a long time ago. The paper said he lives in Rhode Island. That’s all I know, really.”
“Apparently Barry Fields once threw him and Anne Marie Sturdivant out of the Triplex movie house for bothering other patrons, and Michael threatened to break Fields’ legs. Do you know this story?”
“No. Wow. Break his legs?”
“And Steven told one of the hot-tub borrowers who resisted repaying his loan ahead of schedule that he might just have his legs broken if he didn’t pay up. It’s a uniquely mob-like way of interacting with people, and in this extended family, leg-breaking threats seem to trip off people’s tongues with unusual ease.”
Morley said, “I hope this isn’t like Chekhov’s gun on the mantelpiece, which, if it’s visible when the curtain rises, has to go off before the curtain goes down.”
“That has to do with the audience’s dramatic needs,” Timmy said. “I for one do not feel the need for any leg-breaking. I don’t even like noogies.”
I said, “And there are several features of Jim’s murder that look a lot like a mob hit. Is it possible that Sturdivant only seemed to recoil from his gangster-father background, and that he was in fact into something illegal with or without his brother? He kept his being gay rigidly compartmentalized. Maybe he had yet another aspect of his life that he kept secret. And Steven knows about it, and is happy to see Barry Fields take the rap for the killing so that none of this whatever-it-is comes to light?”
Everyone at the festive table looked unnerved by this possibility.
Murano said, “I don’t know why Jim would have been mixed up in anything truly criminal. He made tons of money legitimately. Why would he do it?”
“To connect with the memory of his real father?” Morley asked. “Stranger things have happened, psychologically speaking.”
“And,” Timmy said, “we know Jim was so uncomfortable with being gay that he never publicly acknowledged his relationship with Steven. Maybe he became a mob guy because it was butch. A diversionary tactic not to throw off the general public, but for… whose benefit? His brother? His mother?”
“The Sturdivants and Muranos all knew Jim was gay,” Murano said. “It was just never spoken of. As long as Jim didn’t flaunt it – that is, mention it north of Great Barrington – the façade of churchy hetero respectability was maintained. And that’s what really mattered to Anne Marie, I’m sure. She could tell the girls at Mount Carmel bingo night that her middle-aged son Jimmy just hadn’t met the right girl yet.”
I said, “Who would be in the best position to know about current Berkshire County mob activities and whether or not any Muranos or Sturdivants might be involved?”
Murano and Morley looked at each other somberly and nodded. Murano said, “Thorne Cornwallis would be the person to talk to. But we really would not recommend that.”
“Why not?”
They just sighed and shook their heads.
Chapter Eighteen
“This is bullshit, total crap! I have never heard such lamebrained, dickhead, idiotic crap, and believe me, I’ve heard it all!”
Thorne Cornwallis was livid, in the clinical sense, his blocky face crimson. I watched to see if his hairpiece would twirl, cartoonlike, on a propeller pin, but it only bobbed a few times.
I was seated across a cluttered desk from the DA in his office near the Berkshire County Courthouse. The third-floor office overlooked Park Square in the center of Pittsfield. The square was actually an oval, a heavily traveled, multi-laned traffic rotary with grass, trees and a Civil War monument in the middle. My attention went back and forth between Cornwallis sputtering and flailing his arms a few feet from me and the bumper-car mayhem down below.
I had called the DA’s office hoping to set up an appointment for Monday, but Cornwallis himself happened to be alone in the office and picked up the phone. When I told him I was working for the Fields defense and had a mob-hit angle I wanted to pursue, Cornwallis let fly with a string of obscenities and then said he would give me ten minutes before he had me run out of town. Timmy remained at the Morley-Murano den of gay-marriage perdition while I went off for some face time with Berkshire County ’s head prosecutor.
“Jim Sturdivant was about as likely to be whacked by the mob as Elton John would be,” Cornwallis told me, waggling a beringed, well-manicured stub of a finger in my direction. “The last time a Pittsfield Murano was associated with organized crime was more than fifty years ago. Does old-school, name-ends-with-a-vowel organized crime still exist in Berkshire County? Yes, it does. But it’s small-bore, piss-ant stuff – sports betting, a couple of numbers operations – and nothing that a type of person like Jim Sturdivant would need to be involved with or would ever be interested in getting anywhere near. The last mob homicide in this county was probably twenty-five years ago. Assault? That’s another story. When the mob hurts someone, it’s usually gambling-related, and the old-fashioned methods still apply. Knee-capping, leg-breaking, lead-pipe stuff. But shoot-to-kill is what the new guys do, the blacks and the South Americans, the serious drug operators. And unless Jim Sturdivant was Sheffield ’s heroin kingpin, his murder was not mob-related. Which leaves us with what, Mr. Strachey? Your client – angry, violent, unstable Barry Fields.”
“Except,” I said, “Fields didn’t do it.”
Cornwallis sneered. “You’re so naïve.”
“Fields had no weapon. He had no real motive. He’s not dumb – after the cheese attack he had to know he’d be the prime suspect. He’s volatile, but he’s no fool.”
“Fields has a history of violence. He can’t control himself. He finally snapped and lost all control.”
I said, “Fields is angry and argumentative. That doesn’t mean a lot. Take you, for instance. You’re angry and argumentative, but you don’t go around shooting people. Some people, for a variety of reasons, turn out that way.
They usually make poor spouses, and I wouldn’t want one as my fifth-grade teacher. But if American society locked up all its deeply angry people, the country’s incarceration rate would be even more ridiculous than it is now.”
Cornwallis got even redder. Maybe he didn’t appreciate my including him in the nation’s prone-to-hissy-fit population.
As he glared at me and appeared about to let loose again, I added, “And then there’s this additional complication. A lot of angry people have good reasons for being angry. Barry Fields certainly has one now. You’ve got him in jail based on next to nothing. And he may have other reasons too. What do you know about Fields’ background?”
Looking dangerously scarlet now, Cornwallis spat out, “Get out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get. Out.”
“You want me to leave?”
“That’s what I said, yes. Just get the fuck out of here.”
He seemed to be struggling to hold back and prove me wrong after I called him a deeply angry man. But a major artery was throbbing on the side of the DA’s neck, and I feared it might burst, spattering blood throughout the office if not the entire western side of Pittsfield ’s busy Park Square.
“Apparently I’ve made a poor first impression,” I said. “I’m sorry. I actually thought I might be helpful. I still can be, I think.”
“Just leave. Now.”
I said, “Barry Fields has a mysterious past. But I guess you know about that. That’s one reason you’re focused on him.”
Cornwallis blinked. He said, “What do you know about Fields’ past?” I c
ould see his pulse rate drop marginally.
What I was thinking was, Thorny, why don’t you go first and tell me what you know? What I said was, “Fields comes from a troubled background.”
He didn’t bite. “Yeah? Which is?”
“His parents died in a boating accident when Barry was six, and he was raised by porpoises in the Andaman Sea.”
Cornwallis calmed down even further and said, “You don’t know any more than I do about Fields’ background, do you now, Mr. Strachey?”
“No, I do not. He is secretive about his past. His current identity goes back only about six years. Before that his life is a black hole.”
“What we discovered,” Cornwallis said, “is that Fields not only has no criminal record, he has no record of existing at all prior to his move to Great Barrington. Maybe in your mind, Mr. Strachey, that is a factor in his favor. In our minds it is the opposite.”
I said, “What do you know about Jim Sturdivant’s lending practices? His personal loans to acquaintances is what I’m referring to.”
Cornwallis blanched, a trick for a man so florid. “I know more about the Sturdivant-Gaudios hot-tub loan office than I care to think about,” he said. “The homosexual lifestyle is a mystery to me, and in my work I have become acquainted with practices that do not make it any less mysterious.”
“And you don’t think there’s any connection between Sturdivant’s financial practices and his murder?”
“Oh, but I certainly do see a connection,” Cornwallis said, leaning toward me and looking smug. “Bill Moore was one of Sturdivant’s borrowers. Steven Gaudios is prepared to testify to that fact and to produce records. Obviously, Moore was having a sexual relationship with Sturdivant – one of the terms of the low-interest loan – and Fields had a jealous fit and attacked Sturdivant and then killed him.” He sat looking at me coolly, as if my challenging this version of events would be foolhardy and stupid.
I said, “That’s nuts. Moore climbed into the Sturdivant-Gaudios hot tub just once. It was before he and Fields were a pair. Fields heard about the transaction later, and he found it gross. But he did not expect Moore to be a virgin when they wed, and he was not sexually jealous. Fields was mad at Sturdivant because Sturdivant hired me to investigate Fields before he married Bill Moore. Sex had nothing to do with it.”
Death Vows Page 13
