A vivid half-moon hung over the one-story motel, and bright, good-humored clouds moseyed by every so often. My view of my own car and motel room was clear, full and head-on. I had closed the drapes in the room and turned off all the lights. A nightlight burned above the door to my room, unit eight. A minivan was parked by the room to the left of mine, and just before midnight a car drove in and parked in the space to the right. A middle-aged man and woman let themselves into unit seven, and the lights stayed on until 12:40.
I had a big cup of good coffee with me, and it seemed that if I didn’t really think about it much, a cigarette would have been nice. I had been off that ambrosial toxin for a long time, but on semitropical Nights in the Gardens of Great Barrington like this one, those old yearnings hung in the air mockingly. Of course, if I had actually smoked, I’d likely have projectile vomited the maki sushi I’d enjoyed several hours earlier across the parking lot onto the rear window of the shiny Lexus in front of unit seven.
I played the car radio quietly for a while, listening to the old jazz on WAMC. Some wonderful Coleman Hawkins numbers from the ‘40s gave me that wish-I’d-been-bornsooner feeling jazz from that era often does. Though if I’d been born sooner I’d be dead sooner and maybe already up in my mother’s Presbyterian heaven, where all they played were Leroy Anderson favorites, a harrowing eternity of Bugler’s Holiday.
At 2:21 a black Ford Explorer pulled in off Route 7. The Boxwood Motor Inn sign along the highway had its no vacancy section lit, but the SUV drove in anyway and paused in front of the motel office before slowly moving down the row of units that included mine. The vehicle came to a stop behind my Nissan. A figure stepped out of the front passenger side of the Explorer. He had what looked like a baseball bat in his right hand. The man was in work pants and a dark windbreaker and was tall and bulky.
I picked up my nine millimeter off the passenger seat beside me. The man with the bat did not pound on the door to my room or attempt to break it down. Instead, he smashed the windshield and headlights on my Nissan, did the same with the side and rear windows, and then got back into the SUV, which quickly rolled out onto the highway and turned north. I memorized the vehicle’s New York state tags and then wrote the number down.
I thought, Well, that wasn’t so bad. My pulse was pounding, but I was uninjured, I hadn’t had to shoot anybody, or get shot, and my toothbrush and shampoo were safe inside the room. I hadn’t learned much – just the license plate number of some vandals – but the incident certainly seemed to confirm that I had whomped a local Mafia hive with a stick, and all this mob mayhem had something to do with the murder of exemplary citizen and exquisite Sheffield homosexual Jim Sturdivant. That still made little sense to me, but finally I was getting somewhere.
Lights came on in several motel rooms, and the door opened to unit nine. A young man in sweat pants and a T-shirt looked out and around. The motel owner or night manager must have heard the commotion, and she came out wrapped in a sari. Both converged on my car and stood looking and exclaiming over the damage. I got out of the rental car and walked over.
I said, “That’s my car. I guess we have to call the police.”
They both stared at me.
“Weren’t you in your room?” the motel lady said. “Why were you in that other car?”
“It’s complicated,” I said, and then I heard my cell phone ring in the rental car. I said, “Excuse me for one minute,” and walked back to the Subaru.
“This is Strachey.” I looked for the caller number, but it had been blocked.
A male voice said, “Your house on Crow Street gets it next, and then your boyfriend, Tim Callahan. Do you understand what we’re saying?”
“Sure.”
“Just leave it alone.”
“Okay.”
Click.
I went back to where four people now stood peering at my smashed car.
“I’ll phone the police,” the motel lady said and headed back toward the office.
The guy in the T-shirt said, “They only went after your car, not anybody else’s. You must have pissed somebody off.”
“I think I did.”
“Any idea who?”
“Yeah, I think I know.”
“Did you see it happen?”
“I did.”
Now the guy just stared at me. Then he turned and walked back toward his room. He wanted no part of this, whatever it was. Smart. But he stood in the open doorway to his room to see what would happen next.
I had my phone with me now, and I called Timmy.
He answered immediately and said, “Don, wait. I’ve got someone on call-waiting. You have to hear this.”
“Hear what?” But he was gone.
The motel lady came out of the office again and strode my way. She moved with more confidence now that she had called the cops.
Timmy came back on the line. “They got your office!” he said excitedly. “That was a night detective at Division Two calling. Somebody apparently firebombed your office, and a lot of the building is burning. Nobody seems to have been hurt, but your office is totaled. Don, I’m sorry, but are you okay?”
“Yeah, I am. How do they know it was arson? The wiring in that place dates to the Harding administration.”
“Some of the crackheads in the parking lot saw it happen. Though the detective said he didn’t have a good description of the bomb-thrower, and he wants to talk to you. Maybe you should come home if you’re alert enough to drive. Did anything happen over there?”
I described my evening of excellent jazz and watching my car windows and headlights get obliterated. As I spoke, a Great Barrington police cruiser turned in off Route 7, its flashers putting on their light-show for no apparent reason.
Timmy said, “So there was no frank and useful exchange of views with the window-smasher?”
“No, I didn’t even follow him. I ID’d the vehicle, so there didn’t seem to be any point in trying to tail him. Or maybe I’m just more cautious than I used to be. Or in middle age I’m losing my nerve. What time was the firebombing?”
“Around one-fifteen, the police said.”
“It could have been the same guys as here. There was time for them to drive over here. Actually, after they did a job on my car, they phoned me.”
The Barrington cop was looking at the damage with a flashlight and talking with the motel lady, and they both glanced my way from time to time.
“What do you mean, they phoned you?” Timmy said.
“They had my cell number. They must have gotten it from Johnny Montarsi. They warned me off the case. Or that was my interpretation. They also mentioned your name, Timothy. They warned me off the Sturdivant case, and then they mentioned your name. If you get my drift.”
“Oh. Well. Oh.”
“They also said something about our house being next. So here’s the deal. You have to visit your sister in Rochester. They won’t know about Maureen. And I’ll call some people to keep an eye on our house.”
“Who?”
“Some people from South Pearl Street you’d rather not hear about. They’ll do it for money.”
The Great Barrington cop was coming my way now, followed by the motel lady.
Timmy said, “There’s no way I’m going to Rochester. I’m coming over there.”
“Mr. Strachey?” the officer said.
“Timmy, I have to speak with a policeman now. All right, don’t go to Rochester. Drive over here, check into another motel, and then call me and tell me where you are.”
He agreed to this, and I told the cop I needed to use the john and I would be right with him. In my motel bathroom, I placed a call to Albany and arranged for our Crow Street house to be protected in return for an exorbitant fee that was only a little less than Bill Moore was paying me. Oh, yes, Bill Moore, Bill Moore, Bill Moore. Where the hell was Mr. FBI agent/assassin/hot-tub borrower/same-sex bridegroom, anyway?
The police officer was young, well-scrubbed and looked at me suspiciously. He as
ked for my ID, which I produced, including my PI license. He said, “Do you have any idea who did this, sir?”
“I do,” I said, and told the cop that I had been having an affair with the actress Pamela Anderson, who, I said, was currently appearing in a play at the Williamstown Theater Festival. I said I had heard that Ms. Anderson’s manager believed it was her daily frequent bouts of incredible sex with me that were causing the actress to repeatedly blow her lines, and by smashing up my car the manager was warning me away from his distracted and exhausted client.
“What’s this manager’s name?” the cop said.
“Shel Glazer.”
“He’s in Williamstown?”
“I’m not sure where he’s staying.”
The officer’s radio crackled, and he went over to the festively lit cruiser to deal with some more urgent matter. I took the opportunity to rapidly collect my belongings from unit eight. The cop was still yacking on his radio when I came out, so I took this additional opportunity to climb into the rental car and drive away.
Chapter Twenty-three
So I was going to have to do this myself. To bring the cops in in a big way was to risk Timmy’s safety, and mine, and our Albany home. The police and the DA would have to finish the job when the time was right. But for the moment I would have to be the one to shine a light into the chaotic and violent jungle to which Jim Sturdivant had somehow led so many of us. As I drove south into Great Barrington and thought about poor Barry Fields and his horrible family about to show up in the Berkshires, I began to see faint glimmerings of how I might sort all this out and keep all or most of the innocent parties from getting hurt. But that would take some luck and some arrangements.
I parked outside the Dunkin’ Donuts just south of downtown Great Barrington and made some calls. It was after three a.m., and I was reluctant to waken Ramona Furst, but I did.
An immediately alert Ramona said, “I’m glad you called. I was going to call you, but I didn’t want to waken you.”
“Actually, I was up.”
“I wasn’t, but I was sleeping crappily, so it’s just as well you called. The thing is, Barry is in Two Jones. That’s the involuntary-admission psych unit at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield. He’s on a suicide watch. The jail psychologist isn’t sure Barry isn’t faking it. It could be a way of making sure his family can’t get near him. Or it could be a genuine reaction to his hated family’s arrival here. Supposedly, they are on their way from somewhere in the Midwest. Whatever Barry is feeling or doing, I’m worried as hell about him.”
“That stinks. Poor Barry. So who are the awful Fields family, or whatever their names are? How did they identify themselves?”
“His mother wouldn’t say. She just told the jail CO she spoke to that she and the rest of Barry’s family – she said his real name was Benjamin – were coming to reclaim him, from the jaws of Satan or some crazy crap like that. And they would be here by Monday. She also asked about Jim Sturdivant’s funeral, when and where it was.”
“The funeral?”
“I’m wondering about that. If they’re so awful, why would they want to pay their respects to the man their son is accused of murdering?”
Now it was coming clear. I got goose bumps, and I was hit by a sudden wave of dizziness. I said, “Did the officer tell them about the funeral? Not that it would be hard to find out about. It was in the paper. The funeral is Monday at ten at Mount Carmel Church in Pittsfield.”
“I think he did tell them, yeah. Even though the mother did sound like a real piece of work, the CO said.”
I wanted to do some checking to confirm my awful suspicions about Fields’ family, so I told Furst my immediate concern was dealing with the thugs who had smashed my car, torched my office, and warned me off the case.
“The thugs who did what?”
I described my incident-filled evening, eliciting exclamations and gasps even from this woman who had seen far more of the criminal world than your average Berkshire professional woman had. I said, “I’m more certain than ever that Sturdivant was killed by a mob hit man, possibly this guy Cheap Maloney from Schenectady. The remaining big question is, why?”
“Another remaining big question,” Furst said, “is how are you going to develop enough evidence to get Thorny to accept this inconvenient truth and go after the mobsters and release Barry?”
“I’m giving that a lot of attention,” I said, “as is well-traveled Bill Moore, supposedly. Have you heard from Bill?”
“No, but I left a message on his voicemail about Barry being moved to the psych unit. Surely he’ll call me.”
“Yeah, surely.” I told Furst I still had some other matters to attend to and I would be in touch later in the morning. She said she was going to try to get some sleep, and I said that sounded useful.
I called Division Two in Albany and talked to an officer about my bombed office. He assured me that no one had been injured, but he said my second-floor office was a charred wreck and the office of the divorce lawyer next door was also ruined. The vacant storefront below me had been badly damaged, as had the consignment shop next to it. The thought of my office being gone hurt a lot. All my computer files were backed up on discs at home, but my main workplace was an extension of my personality – frayed, sturdy, quirky, messy – and it felt as if a central piece of my life in Albany had been extinguished prematurely. There was also the matter of the signed photograph of jazz great Anita
O’Day that had hung on the wall next to my desk, and for that loss someone was going to pay dearly.
The cop said a detective wanted to speak with me as soon as possible, and I obediently wrote down his name and number. Though for a number of reasons that would have to wait.
I phoned my Albany cop friend who had been helpful checking out Cheap Maloney. He didn’t answer and was no doubt asleep, and I left a message giving the tag number and asking him to identify the owner of the Explorer that had carried the burly window-smasher to the Boxwood motel an hour and some minutes earlier. I asked my friend to let me know what he came up with as soon as he could.
Then I called AAA and asked them to tow my useless car to the Subaru garage where I had rented the car I was sitting in outside the donut shop. By then, the time-to-make-thedonuts aromas were wafting heavily through my window, though eating anything at all felt as if it would be asking for trouble – nausea, semiconsciousness, etc. – so I sat tight.
Timmy phoned soon after and told me he had taken a room at a Comfort Inn on Route 7, and why didn’t I drive over and get comfortable? I was there in six minutes.
“This is getting dangerous,” he said as I sprawled on the bed next to him. “This is not what you had in mind when Jim Sturdivant asked you to check up on a supposed young con man who was going to marry Sturdivant’s dear, dear friend.”
“No, Timothy, none of this is at all what I had in mind.”
“And getting me onto some mob goon’s hit list is not what you were after either. As far as I know.”
“No, if I wanted you offed, I’d do it myself. I’d smother you with my love, and your muffled cries would haunt me for days.”
Timmy said, “What do you think chain-motel bedspreads are made out of? Recycled Pepsi bottles? Where does that smell come from? If these bedspreads could talk, what would they say? Perhaps Jimmy Hoffa was killed by the Mafia, ground up, and stuffed deep inside a motel bedspread. Maybe that’s the smell I’m trying to locate. Maybe the same thing will happen to you, and to me. And quite soon. Would you care to comment on my speculation?”
I said, “I’m on top of the mob angle. Yes, we both have to be careful. These are bad, violent people. You can still go to Rochester if you want to.”
He said, “Nah.”
“Steven Gaudios knows who these people are, I’m certain. I’m going to give him one more chance to tell us who killed Sturdivant and why. It’s something the two of them were up to that drove Sturdivant’s brother Michael completely over the edge. And I think he
had Jim killed, and then he told Steven to get out of town or the same thing would happen to him.”
Timmy was listening, but I could sense his breathing slowing down, and although he was still in his khakis and T-shirt, the idea of sleep was massaging his supple mind. I thought I knew, however, how I could sharpen his attention, if not make him sit bolt upright.
I said, “I still don’t know what Sturdivant did to enrage the mob, but one thing has become clear. Barry Fields and his unhappy family situation had nothing to do with it. If anything, Barry’s cheese-wheel attack on Jim in Guido’s was a fortuitous coincidence for the killer, who saw it as a chance to get rid of Jim and frighten Steven without the police and DA looking beyond what to them was the obvious, and digging deeply into Sturdivant’s and Gaudios’s affairs.”
Timmy murmured, “Right.”
“The reason I’m so sure Barry’s family had nothing to do with it is this: I’m reasonably certain I now know who they are.”
His eyes had closed, but now they fluttered. “Oh really? Who are they?”
I told Timmy about Barry being taken to the psych unit in Pittsfield, where he was on a suicide watch.
“Oh no,” he said and grew alert.
I told him about Barry’s mother phoning him at the jail and informing him that the family was on their way to Pittsfield. I said Barry’s mother also asked a corrections officer about the Sturdivant funeral, which was scheduled for Monday at ten.
I said, “What awful people have made it a practice to turn up at gay people’s funerals all over the country?” Timmy was awake now. “What large extended family and their religious followers go to gay funerals and wave signs that say God Hates Fags and Homos Will Burn in Hell?”
Death Vows Page 16
