Timmy said, “No.”
“I think so.”
“Barry is a – what? Grandson of Reverend Felson?”
“Barry’s from the Midwest. Reverend Fred Felson operates out of a Baptist church in Topeka. Bud Radziwill told Ramona Furst that Barry and Bud met in the Emerald City, meaning
Barry probably followed the Yellow Brick Road – as you yourself sagely speculated – out of whatever hellish situation he came from. That’d be Kansas. Barry told me he didn’t think his family had anything to do with Jim Sturdivant’s death because they don’t have to kill people with weapons, that they have their own means for murder. That sounds like the Felson family, the people who picketed Matthew Shepherd’s funeral and screamed that he had it coming.”
Timmy was sitting up now. “And Reverend Felson is on his way to Pittsfield?”
“I think so.”
“God, that makes it more urgent than ever that we get Barry out of jail and safely away from both Thorne Cornwallis and away from his family!”
I said, “I know.”
Chapter Twenty-four
I set Timmy’s alarm for eight and fell into a deep sleep that was interrupted by the alarm’s bleat before I could get any terrifying dreams revved up. Timmy woke up apparently refreshed and headed for the sink and mirror. Raised Catholic, he observed a Muslim-like ritual of step-by-step ablutions involving several gallons of water, numerous potions, and a carton of appliances he carried with him whenever he left the house overnight. I had thought this might be a habit he’d picked up during his Peace Corps years in a predominantly Muslim section of India, but Timmy’s sister Maureen once told me that he had always been what she called a “bathroom hog.” I said something about it early in our relationship, and he replied, “You might try freshening up a little more extensively yourself once in a while.” And that was it for that subject.
While Timmy abluted, I made some calls. I remembered from news stories that Reverend Felson’s church in Topeka was the Southboro Baptist Church, so I retrieved the church’s number from Verizon and dialed it. It was just after seven Sunday morning in Kansas, and a female voice answered the phone. When I asked to speak to Reverend Felson, I was told he was out of town for several days, and did I wish to speak to the assistant pastor? I said no and asked if the reverend was headed for Massachusetts. “Yes, the pastor is descending into the belly of the beast, and we must all pray for him,” the lady said. I told her I was actually calling from Satan’s lower intestine and wished her a good day.
I called Ramona Furst, who said, “Bill Moore will be back in town later this morning, and he wants to see you.”
“Finally. So what’s Bill’s report?”
“He just said he’d talk to you and will phone you when he gets to Great Barrington. He sounded upset, and he’s very concerned about Barry. I’m going to try to get him into Two Jones to see Barry this afternoon.”
“He didn’t say what he came up with in Washington? Supposedly Moore was going to gather information that was so crucial that it was okay for him to disappear for over forty-eight hours. That’s what he told Bud Radziwill.”
“No, he sounded totally frustrated with whatever he ran into down in DC.”
I said, “Maybe the guy is some kind of pariah at the FBI, or wherever it was he worked. Maybe there was something he did that was especially controversial or politically embarrassing to the Bushes, and nobody dares speak with him.”
“Or maybe,” Furst said, “whatever Bill dug up is not exculpatory for Barry. That, we don’t need.”
I told her what I had deduced about Barry’s horrendous family, the Felsons.
Furst said, “Dear God.”
“Exactly.”
“And you think it’s Reverend Felson who’s on his way here to reclaim Barry?”
“I do.”
“We have to save him!”
“We will. One way or another. I have some preliminary thoughts about that.”
“Are you safe yourself? From the thugs?”
“I’m okay,” I said, “as long as they think I’m off the case. Has Radziwill turned up? Or Jean Watrous? They must have heard from Barry that Reverend Felson is headed this way, and that’s why they ran for their lives.”
“I’ve had no word from either of them. Don, if Barry is really a Felson, I wonder what Bud is?”
“Think Texas,” I said. “That’s his accent, no?”
“Actually,” Furst said, “Bud sounds more like a guy I know in Pittsfield, a painter from the Southwest, who talks the same way. But there are differences between his and a Texas accent. Bud’s is softer and sweeter than Texas, with its y’alls all the time. I’d say Bud – no Kennedy cousin, for sure – is not so much Texas as Oklahoma.”
I went quickly through my News of the Week brain Google, and that’s when something else clicked. I said, “I’ll ask Bud if he’s from Oklahoma when I see him, as soon as this is all over. Which is going to be quite soon.”
“For Barry’s sake, and yours, and Timmy’s, it had better be over soon.”
“Noted.”
I reached Joe Toomey’s voicemail and gave him a crisp summary of recent events. I was planning on asking for his help soon, and it was important that he be kept up to date. I considered trying to reach Thorne Cornwallis. But he plainly was a man who would have to be handed the truth on a silver platter – and then maybe have his face shoved in it – and that was impossible until I knew why the mob had so badly wanted Jim Sturdivant dead.
After I showered, Timmy and I availed ourselves of the “continental” breakfast in the motel lobby – the “continent” must have been Trans-Fatia – and picked up the Sunday papers at a nearby convenience store. The Berkshire Eagle again led with the Sturdivant murder. The story had no new actual information, though that was not a hindrance to the paper’s covering much of its front page with photos of smiling Jim Sturdivant and glowering Thorne Cornwallis and a wordy recap of the bloody crime.
Timmy chose to stay at the hotel and make his way through the Sunday Times while I visited Steven Gaudios. During the drive down to Sheffield, I tried Bill Moore’s cell phone again, and this time he answered.
“Let’s have lunch,” Moore said. “Didn’t Ramona tell you I was on my way back?”
“She did. So are you going to show up for lunch this time, or will you do your vanishing act again? I’ve had enough of that.”
“No, you can depend on me this time, Strachey. I mean, up to a point. The thing is, I didn’t find out what I thought I would find out, I’m sorry to say.”
“Stuff happens, to quote our secretary of defense. But what did you learn?”
“Listen, I’m down on Route 7 in Connecticut, and the cell service is spotty. Let’s meet at my house at twelve. We can order pizza.”
I thought, Here we go. “You bet, Bill. See you at noon at your place.” And don’t assassinate anybody in Falls Village as you pass through. Pizza for lunch? On four hours’ sleep, I’d be dozing by mid-afternoon. I was feeling crankier and crankier, and I had my reasons.
Down in Sheffield, the Gaudios-Sturdivant house was quiet. One of the BMWs was gone, but the convertible was in the driveway with its top down. The For Sale sign was still in the yard. I parked behind the Beemer and walked around back. The pool was deserted, as was the hot tub, and the rhubarb that marked the grave of the martini-drinking terrier.
I went up the back steps and banged on the screen door. Gaudios soon appeared, in Bermuda shorts and a fresh white polo shirt, and he looked annoyed, so very, very annoyed, to see me.
“You just don’t know when to quit, do you, Donald?”
“Did you think I was off the case, Steven? Is that it?”
“I can’t invite you in. I am incredibly busy.”
I tried to open the screen door, but it had been latched from inside. I drove my fist through the screen and unlatched the door. Gaudios fell back and went for a cell phone on the kitchen counter. I grabbed it from him and snapped, “
Sit down.”
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” he said bitterly and flopped onto a kitchen chair.
“I’m dealing with the mob,” I said. “And you’re one of them.”
“Ha!” Gaudios snorted, and threw his head back like Tallulah.
“You and Jim were into something the mob didn’t like. The mob, in this case, being, among others, Jim’s brother, Michael, a wiseguy in Providence.”
Gaudios’s face contorted, and he looked away.
I said, “The hot-tub loans, they were nothing. Just a couple of obnoxious rich queens playing games with younger gay men who were poorer in wealth but often richer in spirit and integrity.”
“What a horrid thing to say!”
“But you two had some other racket going, with much higher stakes, that helped get you your houses in New York and Palm Springs and Ibiza and all the rest of it. Along the way, however, you were stupid and reckless enough to cross somebody – somebody treacherous and big and mean. And whoever it was that you fucked with had Jim killed and then ordered you to get lost before you were whacked, too. Am I right?”
Gaudios was slowly shaking his head as tears streamed down his face. “You’re wrong, Donald. You are so, so wrong!”
“Are you telling me that the goons who smashed up my car last night and threatened me and Timmy if I kept trying to clear Barry Fields were not mob guys connected to Michael Sturdivant? Don’t tell me that, Steven, because the evidence is mounting. And where I am treading, Thorne Cornwallis will follow close behind. You can partially redeem yourself by cooperating, and I’m sure you can get into the Witness Protection Program and still live like a prince on some tropical isle where you can resume your hot-tub operations and enjoy a long life of strong martinis and copious dick. But now, finally, you have to tell the truth.”
Gaudios sat transfixed by my monologue. Then he said quietly, “Jim and I both made our money honestly.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I can show you.”
“You’re lying. All the evidence – everything I know and have seen in the past three days – says you’re lying.”
“Come with me.” He got up, and I followed him closely through the dining room and into a small study.
I said, “If you’ve got a gun in here, forget it.” I produced my nine-millimeter and aimed it at him.
“You’re awfully melodramatic, Donald. I thought private eyes only waved revolvers around in cheesy TV shows.”
“Dealing with you represents a special occasion,” I explained.
Gaudios sat behind a beautiful mahogany desk with a tidy surface and retrieved some Smith Barney statements from a drawer. He spread them out for me to look at. I perused the documents and saw that Gaudios’s assets were diversified and his net worth, just from the accounts in front of me, totaled maybe thirty-five million dollars.
I said, “Money-laundering works wonders. Congratulations.”
He said, “I worked in financial-institution mergers and acquisitions for thirty years. My fees and commissions were generous. I was also both prescient and lucky. Note my one hundred Berkshire Hathaway shares. I purchased those shares in 1978 for a hundred and sixty dollars each. Today they are worth a hundred and eight thousand dollars each.”
I had watched CNBC for an hour once, and all of this sounded plausible. This was how capitalism worked for the people who had thought it up and had found ways to stay awake through Wall Street Week.
I said, “You called in the hot-tub loans, and when one of the borrowers protested, you threatened to break his legs. Did you pick that particular technique up in mergers and acquisitions?”
“Oh, that was just my anti-depressants talking. I could no more break anybody’s legs than spit nickels. Really, Donald, just how butch do you think I am?”
I said, “But gangsters killed Jim. Of that I am certain. Why?”
Gaudios looked me hard in the eye and said, “No, Barry Fields killed Jim. And you have been conned by a very disturbed but very clever young man.”
“No, Steven. Barry Fields is no killer. He is an angry young man with plenty to be angry about. And you’ll soon see up close why he is so terribly angry. But murderously violent he is not.”
“Really? How can you be so sure?”
I said, “Was Jim’s biological father a Mafioso?”
Gaudios was unperturbed. “He was. It was a terrible embarrassment for Jim, growing up in Pittsfield with people knowing his father had died in a jail-yard stabbing.”
“And Jim’s brother, Michael? Has he not carried on a fine family tradition?”
Gaudios was sweating lightly now, even in this exquisitely furnished room cooled by all-but-noiseless central air-conditioning. He said, “Jim had his suspicions, but he never really knew much about Michael’s life in Rhode Island. I think it’s fair to say Jim didn’t really want to know. Jim and I built a life far, far away from certain unhappy elements of our childhoods – criminality, yes, but not just criminality. The life we made together would have been even farther away had Jim been willing to live apart from his mother. But he was devoted to Anne Marie, and so here we are – or were – a stone’s throw from Pittsfield and all that old pain. It hasn’t been easy, in that respect. But I must say, in our own way, we’ve had our deep satisfactions. And our revenge.”
“Revenge?”
“Living well is the best revenge, as Abraham Lincoln said.”
“And so,” I asked Gaudios, “who, then, are these mob goons who have threatened to hurt me and Timmy if I don’t get off the case and quit trying to free Barry Fields?”
Gaudios was all serene now. “I really couldn’t begin to answer that question, Donald. Perhaps it’s something you stirred up or got into up in big, bad Pittsfield. It certainly has nothing to do with Sheffield, or with Jim’s death, or with me.”
He sat looking at me levelly, no longer frightened and teary.
I knew he was lying, but I didn’t know how or why. I told Gaudios I would be back, and I got up and went out. As I walked down the back porch steps, I thought I heard him sob once.
Chapter Twenty-five
I drove back to the motel and told Timmy about my meeting with Gaudios.
He said, “So if Steven is lying and he’s in touch with the mob guys, won’t he alert them that you’re still working on the case and you haven’t been frightened off?”
“This is possible.”
“All the more reason to wrap this one up fast.”
“Yes, I would say so.”
I told Timmy I was having lunch with slippery Bill Moore, and he said in that case he would accept Preston Morley’s invitation for a hike up Monument Mountain and a picnic there with Morley and David Murano. Timmy said this was the spot where Hawthorne and Melville once picnicked together and set off intellectual sparks that may have set the course of American literature for the next fifty years.
I said, “I’m sorry I can’t come too, but I’ve got a more immediate and up-to-the-minute bundle of sparks to set off.”
“I wouldn’t dismiss the relevance of Hawthorne and Melville to this case,” Timmy said. “Hawthorne was haunted by his family’s past in Salem, and Melville by what he had seen and done as a young man at sea. The Sturdivant murder seems to have a lot to do with the past catching up with people who thought they had outrun it.”
“Or who thought they could both escape the past and exploit it at the same time.”
We sat there, the Sunday papers spread out around us on the motel bed with the bedspread you didn’t want to get too close to. Did we know what we were talking about? As it happened, yes and no.
Moore’s Honda was parked in his driveway. I pulled in behind it and went up the front steps of his pleasant house on its pleasant hillside. Despite the strain he was under, Moore looked fresh and fit in clean jeans and a navy blue T-shirt. I followed him into the living room with the giant TV and the movie memorabilia. He offered me a beer, and when I declined, he said, “
I guess I better stay sober myself. I’m seeing Barry at three, and he won’t appreciate it if I’m fucked up.”
“How is Barry doing? What have you heard?” I seated myself on one of the leather chairs. There was no sign of pizza – a relief – just some bar nuts in a dish.
“He’s okay, Ramona says, and they’ve got some good shrinks keeping an eye on him. But Barry really needs to get away from here as soon as he can. He is not a violent person, but I’m really afraid of what he’ll do if his family actually shows up here. What a fucking nightmare.”
“I know who they are,” I said.
“Yeah, Ramona told me you figured it out.”
“I understand why he doesn’t want to have anything to do with them, and why he would not want it known that he was a relative. What’s the relationship? Is Barry Reverend Felson’s grandson?”
Moore nodded. “Barry’s mom, Edna, is Fred’s third daughter. His dad is Warren Krider, one of Fred’s loony flock.
Barry’s real name is Benjamin Krider. Warren and Edna tossed him out on the street when he was seventeen after they caught him in bed with a kid in his Bible study class. They didn’t even try to have him de-programmed or exorcised. The nutty de-gaying approach is for the relatively more enlightened Evangelicals. The Kriders just told Barry he was an agent of Satan and to get the hell out.”
“That he is bright and decent didn’t figure in, it looks like.”
“No, bright and decent are not what Christianity is about with the Felsons. Dumb and hateful is the rule. How Barry survived his own family with nothing worse than a lot of anger is a mystery. He can’t explain it himself. He thinks he may have learned how to be human from a couple of teachers he had in school, and from old movies he rented and watched when Edna and Warren were out protesting against homosexuals. Some parents have to worry that their kids are home watching porn, but Barry once told me he was led astray from his family by watching M-G-M musicals, Frank Capra and Truffaut.”
“The Reformed Church of Arthur Freed. I’d have signed up for that. So Barry left Topeka when he was seventeen?”
Death Vows Page 17
