On the other hand,death ds-2 Read online

  He looked neither embarrassed nor smirky, nor did he cackle maniacally. He just shrugged. "I see it as a potential happy coincidence of interests," he said mildly. "And if Mrs. Fisher still refused to deal with us after we'd paid you to clear up this unfortunate business for her, then that would in all probability be the end of it. She would in no way be legally obligated to us."

  "That's correct."

  "I'm prepared to take my chances," he said, smiling faintly. "I've been meeting the public for a good number of years, Mr. Strachey, and I think I know something about human nature. But if I'm wrong-and somehow Mrs. Fisher's gratitude did not extend to accepting our more than generous offer-well, we'd still have the satisfaction of knowing that, whatever the cost, whatever the outcome, Millpond just went ahead and did what was right."

  I said, "What a crock."

  A faint crooked smile. "You're such a skeptic, Mr. Strachey. I suppose that results from your constantly coming into contact with the seamier side of life. Your outlook, I'm afraid, had become just a little bit distorted, if I may say so."

  His statement was not meant to be, so far as I could tell, ironical. I said, "You've got a forty-million-dollar project riding on this."

  He threw up his hands in a what-choice-have-I-got gesture and made a face.

  Irritated, with Trefusis and with myself, and knowing full well how this loony discussion was going to conclude, I said, "Why don't you just let the Albany cops handle it? They have detectives on their force who will look into the matter for a good bit less than 'ten,' and I happen to know there are several who will investigate a crime for no fee at all."

  "Of course they've been notified already," he said, shaking his head doubtfully. "But I want Speedy Gonzales on this one, Mr. Strachey. Someone who can clear it up in a few days. And, as you pointed out, there is the additional advantage for me of your having entree with Mrs.

  Fisher and her friends. I've gotten the impression that relations between Albany's finest and the gay community are not what you would call cordial."

  "Not cordial, no."

  "So there you are."

  "Have you told Mrs. Fisher you were planning on hiring me to do this?"

  "I… left a message."

  "She refused to speak with you today, right?"

  "When I phoned her about your possible involvement, yes. I'm afraid so."

  "Do you know why?"

  "Of course. Mrs. Fisher naturally assumes that Millpond is responsible for the vandalism."

  "The vandalism and the threat. Are you responsible?"

  "No," he said matter-of-factly.

  I waited for a barrage of offended posturings, but the simple denial was all Trefusis had to offer on the subject. A blunt and honorable man of his word.

  Timmy, who works for politicians and knows a rat's nest when he sees one, would have advised that I politely thank Trefusis for his confidence in me and then swiftly flee the premises. But once I'd seen those photos I knew I was going to become involved in the case in one way or another. And, of course, Trefusis was hardly going to miss the "ten"-which I could always split with Dot Fisher after encouraging her, if she needed encouragement, to refuse Trefusis's final offer. I could also urge Dot to suggest to Trefusis's that he take the money he would have paid for her property and donate it instead to the Gay Rights National Lobby, now that he was such an ardent and established benefactor of the cause.

  Knowing too that none of it was going to work out anywhere near as simply as that, I still went ahead and said, "Fine. I'll take the case."

  The brightness of his china blues intensified a degree or two. "I'm pleased," he said, nodding once. "A meeting of minds. I thought we might come to an arrangement, Mr. Strachey, and we have succeeded. Let me write you a check for the five," he said, placidly smiling now and removing a cream-colored checkbook from his inside breast pocket. "Or would you prefer cash?"

  "A check will be fine," I said, remembering the reports of Millpond's vaguely tainted capital.

  What was I getting myself into?

  "And I've got one other thing for you, Mr. Strachey." He reached for a file folder on a shelf behind his desk.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  He said, "A list of suspects."

  3

  I turned onto Fuller Road and headed to ward Central. Bright heat undulated across the concrete pavement and traffic swam through it like schools of blue-fish. I stopped at a gas station phone booth, took a deep breath, and went inside. I phoned Timmy and told him it might be nine o'clock before I'd be able to meet him.

  "Let me guess. You're having a drink with… Buster Crabbe."

  "No, that's you, as I recall. I'm on my way out to Dot Fisher's." I described my meeting with Crane Trefusis.

  "Dot's a real sweet lady," he said, "and I hope you catch the dementos who did it, even if Millpond shares the credit. Dot's a friend of Fenton McWhirter, did you know that? In fact, I think he's staying with her while he's in Albany."

  "Dot gets around for such a late bloomer."

  "You've met her, haven't you?"

  "Once, briefly, at the demonstration after the baths were raided."

  "She caused quite a sensation that day. The cops and the TV people thought she was somebody's grandmother. Of course, she is. So, where do you begin? If, by some crazy chance, Millpond is 8 not behind what's happening out there, who might be?"

  "Trefusis thoughtfully provided me with a list of suspects," I said, moving the door of the airless phone booth back and forth like a fan. "There are two other families on Moon Road with a strong interest in seeing Dot deal. It turns out Millpond has optioned their properties but won't buy outright until Dot's been lined up too. Both parties are hot to sell and don't like it at all that Dot is standing in the way of their windfall. They're very mad, maybe mad enough to provide Dot with some rude encouragement. That's where I begin."

  "Millpond has set it all up with their characteristic finesse," Timmy said. "This way they let someone else do their dirty work without lifting a finger."

  "I think I'll keep an open mind for a day or two on who lifted which finger for what purpose.

  Like you said, Citizen Crane is a fairly complicated guy. He tries to come across as Mister Hardnosed-but-Open-and-Direct, yet the whole time I was with him I felt as though I was in the presence of a rather extensive rain forest. I don't envy anyone who has to navigate his mind regularly."

  "Better take along a machete on this one."

  "My Swiss Army knife will have to do. And my heat-addled brain. See you around nine, then?"

  "Oh… yeah. Around nine. For sure."

  "Swell. See you."

  For sure? In the six years I'd known him I'd never heard him use that phrase. Only twenty-year-olds said that. Where had he picked it up? From a twenty-year-old? Or from someone who spent a lot of time hanging around twenty-year-olds? The hell with it, I thought. Timmy and I were solid, a twosome. The heat was cooking my few million remaining brain cells, that's all it was.

  Marrakech-on-the-Mohawk. Ouagadougou-on-the-Hudson. For sure.

  The two other homes on Moon Road were of more modest proportions, so Dot Fisher's farmhouse was not hard to pick out.

  The first place I passed was an old two-story frame box with flaking tarpaper shingles. The place listed crazily to the southwest, and a newer freshly painted side porch sat partially detached from the sinking house, like a dinghy by a shipwreck. It was easy to see why the owners of this one wanted badly to take Millpond's money and run with it.

  The second house, another fifty yards down the narrow rutted road, was a two-tone beige and electric blue 1950s ranch. It had a big picture window with a lamp in the middle, a double garage, and a long, fat Plymouth Fury wagon with a smashed taillight parked in the driveway.

  There was a green plastic worm with wheels and a seat lying on its side on the recently mowed lawn, and off to the left of the property, in an area where the underbrush had been cut away, a '68

  T-bird was up
on cinder blocks. As at the first house, I saw no sign of life.

  Banging on ahead over the potholes, I passed a Channel 12 TV van lurching and swaying back toward Central Avenue. I guessed I had just missed a media event and had mixed feelings about what the report, once broadcast, was going to mean.

  Moon Road dead-ended just beyond the Fisher house, so I bypassed Dot's driveway with two cars already in it and parked by a scraggly stand of sun-scorched sumac trees where the pavement ended. A newly bulldozed dirt track ran off to the left. The foliage along it was wilting under fine brown dust. I could hear the roar of the traffic on the interstate a hundred yards or so beyond the trees, though not the heavy equipment building the new inter-change-more canny planning by Millpond. It was after four on a Friday now and work had stopped for the weekend. I walked back toward the house.

  As I moved up the fieldstone walkway past long, tall clumps of purple-pink phlox, a young man 9 emerged from behind the house carrying an aluminum ladder. I recognized his face from news photos in The Native and Gay Community News, and I cut across the lawn under a big spreading oak tree to meet him. He was moving purposefully toward the carriage house, which still had the ugly slogans sprayed all over its side, like a Manhattan subway car lost upstate.

  I called, "Hello… Fenton McWhirter?"

  He turned abruptly and looked at me uncertainly for a few seconds, then set the ladder down and extended his hand. "Yes, how do you do? Are you a reporter?"

  "No. Don Strachey. I'm a private investigator. That looks like a real job in this heat. Will the graffiti wash off, or will you have to paint over it?"

  Looking harried and put out, he spoke to me impatiently in a raspy baritone. "Mrs. Fisher isn't sure whether or not she wants to talk to you, you know? You're the guy Crane Trefusis said he was sending out here?"

  "I'm the guy, but I'd probably have come anyway. Try not to think of me as Trefusis's agent. It's true he's paying me, but what the hell."

  He peered at me as if I might not be the most mentally stable person he'd met that day. In ragged cutoffs and a sweat-stained T-shirt, he was in his early thirties, slender but solid, with the sort of lean, exaggeratedly defined musculature and bone structure I'd always associated more with Renaissance anatomical studies than with real people. The lips of his wide mouth were severely ridged rather than rounded, a feature I'd always found erotic, but the mess of teeth beyond them was badly in need of tidying up. His strong face was all angles and planes, with a thick stubble of dirty blond hair that might have been meant as a beard, or could have been the result of his not having had the time, or the interest, to shave for a few days, or could as well have been the way movement people on the West Coast were wearing their faces these days and the fad would reach Albany in 1990. His deep-set gray eyes were smallish and bloodshot, and they looked at me with no pleasure.

  "This Trefusis asshole sent a crew over earlier to repaint the barn," McWhirter said sourly. "Dot told them to fuck off. But she says she knows you, or heard of you or something, and she's surprised you're working for Millpond."

  "That makes two of us," I said. "Life gets complicated sometimes. On the one hand this, on the other hand that."

  He peered at me stonily. "You sound to me like a rather indecisive person to be doing the kind of work you claim you do. I can't actually see how you're going to be any help around here. Dot and Edith need protection, not a lot of bullshit existential angst."

  "Maybe I won't be much help," I said, seized by a fit of free-floating perversity. "Or maybe I will." I wished somebody would offer me a cold Molson's.

  McWhirter was supposed to burst into laughter at this point, and I'd laugh too, and we'd immediately become great pals. But he didn't laugh. He just shook his head incredulously and made a little astonished sound with his breath, like "eeesh." Revolution was a serious business. I hadn't made a hit.

  "What do you mean, 'protection'?" I said, trying to meet him on his own terms, of which I'd run into worse. "Has something else happened since last night? Have there been more threats?"

  His look hardened and he was about to reply, when another figure appeared from around the back corner of the house carrying a gallon can of paint and two brushes.

  "Peter, come over here and meet the gay James Bond," McWhirter said loudly. "He says he's going to catch the assholes who are after Dot-except he's also on their payroll. He's a little confused, but he says not to worry."

  I recognized Peter Greco, McWhirter's lover, an Albany native who'd been in California or on the road with McWhirter since I'd come to Albany eight years earlier, so we hadn't met. He was short and fragile-looking in jeans and no shirt, with shiny olive skin and a frail boy's thin arms. He had an open, quietly cheerful face, curly black hair on his head and chest, and placid dark eyes. I'd always thought poets were supposed to be pimpled and funny-looking, but I'd read some of Greco's verses and he, unhappily, was no Auden, so maybe that explained it.

  "Hi," he said, smiling easily despite McWhirter's sarcastic, and possibly accurate, introduction.

  "You're a gay detective? I don't think I've ever met one before."

  "Of course you have," McWhirter put in emphatically. "You just didn't know they were gay.

  That's the whole point."

  "I'm Don Strachey," I said, offering my hand. There was a brief tussle of fingers and thumbs while we found the old movement handclasp of the '60s. "I am a private investigator, yes, and more or less coincidentally gay, and it's also true that I'm being paid by Millpond. But I'll be working for Dot, if she's agreeable. I'd have done that anyway."

  "Why don't you come in and talk to her?" Greco said, cheerfully accepting me at my word. Was he an instant judge of good character, or a dangerously vulnerable naif? "Dot won't admit it," he said, "but she's really pretty upset, and she can use all the help and support she can get right now. And Edith's not making things any easier."

  I thought at first that "Edith" might be a pet name for McWhirter, but then I remembered.

  I said, "Fine, I'd like to talk with Dot. When did you two arrive? Were you here last night when it happened?"

  "No, we just got into town this morning, but we were here when the letter arrived. It really shook poor old Edith up. At first Dot wasn't even going to show it to her."

  "What letter was that? Trefusis didn't mention a letter."

  McWhirter snapped, "Why should he? He wrote it, didn't he? Or his Mafia goons did. Or maybe you wrote it yourself, Strachey. I've heard all about this Trefusis gangster, and I wouldn't trust anybody who had anything to do with him."

  Greco and I went on with our exchange of information while McWhirter stood there adding to the humidity. "It was in the mailbox when Dot went out around three this afternoon," Greco said.

  "Dot called the police right away, and they said they'd send a detective out, but he hasn't shown up yet. It's just a plain piece of notebook paper with printing that says, 'You're next. You got three days. Saturday you die.' It was addressed to both Edith and Dot."

  I said, "Today's Friday. The letter arrived in the regular mail?"

  Greco nodded. "It was postmarked Wednesday in Albany. Whoever sent it must have thought it would be delivered the next day."

  "Could be," I said. "Somebody who doesn't patronize the Postal Service regularly and doesn't know how slow it can be. Or someone who can't add, or use a calendar."

  "I am going to demand," McWhirter said, eyes flashing, "that the police provide round-the-clock protection for Dot and Edith. And if those assholes aren't out here within half an hour, I am notifying the media and driving straight in to city hall and the mayor's office. It's been two fucking hours since Dot called them!"

  "Ask nicely and the Albany cops might be helpful," I said. "Demand anything of them and they'll vanish without a trace. Or worse. They're a sensitive lot." McWhirter glowered. "As for the mayor," I went on, enjoying myself a little, "I'm fairly certain it's already past his bedtime. Not that he's all that alert and responsive during his waki
ng hours. I'm not saying, Fenton, that 11 municipal government in Albany functions exactly the same way it does in, say, Buenos Aires.

  It's more benign here-slower and sleepier than in the tropics. But don't get your hopes up. To a very large extent, if you're gay in Albany you're on your own. I'm a little surprised at your expectations. Surely you must have run onto similar situations elsewhere."

  McWhirter scowled at me with disgust, as if I were a prince of the local machine instead of one of its taxpaying reluctant benefactors. "And people like you just sit around and take it," he said acidly, then abruptly picked up his ladder and stalked off muttering.

  Greco frowned after him for a moment, then shrugged and smiled, his most natural expression. I thought it would be nice to go lie down with him in some shady spot. He said, "Poor Fenton.

  He's having a hard enough time getting the campaign off the ground, and then when he comes here he runs into this awful mess. It's been a rough year for him, believe me."

  He set down the paint cans and brushes and we walked toward the back of the house past a bed of nasturtiums that looked like cool, soft fire. I said, "There's been no mass of recruits signing on for the gay national strike?"

  A weary laugh. "No, no masses. If the GNS is going to work there'll have to be millions, of course. But so far the people who've pledged to come out of the closet and join the strike can only be numbered in the hundreds. Or maybe tens," he added, shaking his head dolefully. "We've only been to nine cities so far, and we've got almost another year-ten and a half months-to get people committed. But so far it's been pretty discouraging. A joke, really. I mean, it's partly because it's summer, don't you think? People are more interested now in cultivating their tans than they are in social justice. Maybe in the fall…" He turned to me with a tentative smile. "So, how do you think we'll do at the center in Albany tonight?"