Текст книги "Third man out"

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

3

Rutka phoned the first thing next morning. "I need your help," he said.

"I don't think so."

"It's the Keystone Kops out here-the Keystone Kops on Quaaludes. They're useless."

"It's too early to tell."

"No, it can't be too early, it can only be too late. If they don't catch whoever shot me and arrest him, he could try it again. Or somebody else who'd like to get rid of me might see how vulnerable I am and come after me. I have to know somebody's working on this who knows what he's doing if I want to feel secure enough to go on with my work."

On with his work-Albert Schweitzer at Lambarene. I said, "I'm not sure how I feel about your work. No, that's wrong. I disapprove of a lot of it. When you crossed the line from the Roy Cohn types to the merely well-known, you lost me. That's not fair."

Timmy looked up from his Cream of Wheat and mouthed, "Rutka?" I nodded. He looked down again.

"No, it's fair," Rutka said. "Until this heterosexist society knows that we are everywhere, that a high percentage of the most popular and respected people from every area of American life are gay, gay people who are ordinary can never begin to be accepted and feel safe. It's the moral responsibility of every gay man and woman to act as a role model and to…"

He gave me his stump speech. I listened and watched Timmy trying to read my reaction across the cereal. I consumed most of three eggs, up, and an English muffin while Rutka orated.

When he wound down, I said, "I'm pretty much with you on the social analysis but not on the tactics. Doing unto ourselves as others would do unto us can't be the answer. Anyway, whether I agree with you or not is academic. The shooting is a police matter and you should give them a chance and see what they come up with. Maybe they'll surprise you."

"Are you tied up with anything else?"

"As a matter of cold, hard fact, at the moment I am at liberty. But that's beside the point. Also, I do this for a living. I cost money."

"Not always. I've heard about that. But that doesn't matter. I can pay you. I have income from the hardware store. Dad left the business to me and Ann. She runs it and draws a salary, but we split the profits. I have a decent income. What do you charge?"

Timmy was seated behind a container of the clotted sweet tea he had become addicted to in his Peace Corps days in India back at the end of the Pat Boone era, and as he sipped the roily substance, he watched me with growing apprehension.

I said, "I wear red suspenders, drive a week-old BMW, and charge ten thousand dollars a day." Timmy gave a little nod of approval.

Rutka said, "Seriously."

"Seriously, my pants are held up by a disintegrating belt I picked up at an after-Christmas sale at Penney's in 1974, I drive an old Mitsubishi with rust spots on the doors, and my rate is two hundred dollars a day plus expenses."

"That's reasonable. I'd like to hire you."

"To do what?"

"To find out who shot me and have him arrested."

"I'm telling you, John, that's the Handbag Police Department's job. That's how they'll see it and they'll be right. Police departments solve crimes."

"They can't do it."

"You don't know that," I said. "You insist on fairness but you're not being fair."

"I've never insisted on fairness. If you believe that, you don't understand me at all. It's too late for fairness. I want change. I want people to confront their own bigotry, and I want this society to confront its own ignorance and stupidity, and I want bigotry and stupidity to wither under the harsh glare of the sunlight of truth."

"Oh, well. I stand corrected."

A silence, then a long sigh. "Look, Strachey, just put yourself in my place, will you do that? Think how you'd feel and how you'd react if somebody shot a gun at you. Have you ever been shot? I'll bet you have."

"No, just at. They missed."

"But still, you know. You were very frightened."

"Yes."

"And you wanted the person who did it caught and locked up immediately."

"I sure did."

"Then you can begin to understand what I'm going through. How would you feel if your life depended on the level of competence at the Handbag Police Department?"

He had me there. "I guess I'd feel the way you do. Endangered."

"Whatever you think of me, should I be shot and killed?"

"I'm one of those who don't think so, no."

"And what about those who do think so? Can the Handbag Police Department protect me from them?"

"Maybe." When I said "maybe," Timmy's look of apprehension deepened.

"When it's your life, the only one you'll ever have, 'maybe' isn't good enough. Am I right about this?"

"Sure." I looked away from Timmy, out the kitchen window at the box of pink petunias Timmy's Aunt Moira had hauled up from Poughkeepsie on the front seat of her Dodge. The thunderstorm the night before had bent them low, but in the morning sunshine they were starting to perk up nicely. With my well-practiced peripheral vision I could make out Timmy's mouth hanging open lightly. If I'd put a square of glass in front of it, I'd have gotten a little moisture.

"Don't you sometimes do security work?" Rutka said. "Protect people and property for a fee?"

I said I'd done it from time to time.

"Well, how about protecting me? The fact is-" There was a tremulous pause. "The fact of the matter is, Strachey, I'm scared to death. I really am. This time I really put my foot in it. I went after somebody who must be totally wacko. Whoever it is wants me dead and there isn't a fucking thing I can do about it. I'm vulnerable and I don't know what to do. For God's sake, can't you help me just because I'm fucking scared and I want help? I'll pay you, for God's sake, but I really need help."

He waited. "I could talk to you," I finally said to the petunias.

"Will you?"

"It would be a security thing."

"That's what I mean."

"Did you ask the police for protection?"

A half-laugh, half-sob. "They're going to drive by the house once an hour. A fucking lot of good that will do as soon as the killer sees them leave for the next fifty-nine minutes. Or if I leave the house to go anywhere."

"This is true. You're not as well protected as you might be."

"Bub Bailey said they were short-staffed, it being August and vacation time for some of the officers."

"I couldn't stay with you twenty-four hours a day," I said. "If you wanted bodyguards I'd have to hire them and that could become expensive. Is that what you think you want?"

"I'll have to think about that."

"But I could spend some time with you, become a known presence that would have the effect of unbalancing somebody trying to get at you. And I could advise you on precautions to take."

"That could help a lot. And while you were around, I could fill you in on the people who would be the most likely to try to get at me. And naturally you could go through my research material and maybe come up with some leads on your own-stuff you could pass on to the cops without them having to go directly into the material, which I am not about to let the government see."

I said, "Oh, your files, right." I looked Timmy directly in the eye and tried not to blink.

"You might spot something I missed myself," Rutka said. "I've got tons of notes and letters and memos. Sometimes I can't even read the handwriting. Mine or somebody else's."

"I could sift through it. It couldn't hurt. And if I ended up assisting the police in their inquiries in a small way, maybe they would appreciate it, if I was tactful."

"I can't tell you how relieved I am," Rutka said. "You might think I'm dogmatic and overly aggressive, but I'm human too and you recognize that. Whatever some people think I have coming, I don't deserve to be shot dead."

"No."

"Can you come out here this morning and we'll talk? I'm supposed to stay off this foot."

We set a time and he gave me the address.

As I hung up, Timmy set down his mug. "Why are you doing this?"

"Several reasons. Two, anyway. Three."

"This guy has done things that turned your stomach."

"He's also done things I approved of. Bruno Slinger, for one, had it coming." This was the state senatorial aide who had lobbied vigorously, and successfully, to have a hate-crimes bill killed. I said, "Having that low slug sauteed was a public service worthy of a Nobel Prize."

"The Nobel Prize in outing?"

"Biophysics, then."

"Except the stunt backfired, because Slinger is a man comfortable with the big lie. He just denied it and said the fags were trying to smear him. What good did any of it do?"

"It did some good," I said. "People believed it. They don't take Slinger as seriously anymore. His effectiveness could be cut down. People snicker at him behind his back."

"Indeed they do," Timmy said, looking both smug and disgusted, one of his more practiced expressions. "But they don't laugh at him because he's a liar and hypocrite and probably borderline psychotic. They do it because he's gay. He's another wretched homo. See, that's my point: When Rutka outs the monsters, people start talking about monstrous homosexuals. When he outs nice guys who are just well-known, then people talk about gay people as pathetic victims. Either way distorts the truth and hurts the cause. Rutka is unfair and he's wrong and he's dangerous."

I said, "I know. I mean, I agree with you up to a point."

"Which point?"

"Irrationality has its uses. Irrational people have theirs. They draw attention to a problem that's pretty much ignored otherwise, and then the more rational people on the same side of the issue move to the forefront and get taken seriously and the problem starts to get solved." Then I added, all too superfluously, "Sometimes you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette."

"Oh. Oh, please."

I hardly believed I had uttered anything so callously puerile to Callahan, no matter how offhand. I knew that it would not have passed muster at Georgetown, to which Timmy returned every five years along with other alumni to have the gilt on his high moral tone freshly applied, and I doubted the argument would even get by at Rutgers anymore. But I played out my assigned role in our customary dialectic nonetheless, and said, "Progress is necessarily messy. Simply getting straight America's casual acceptance of gay people requires a lengthy battle in which collateral damage is inevitable. Some people are going to get hurt.

But it's necessary and it'll all be seen to have been worth it in the end."

He made a little explosion of air that sounded like "Sploooph." He said, "I thought you were in favor of the all-volunteer army.

And I know you're against cruelly mindless euphemisms."

"Yes, I am against conscription," I said, "unless people are routinely offered a choice to do something nonmilitary that will contribute to the common weal. And I'm not even so sure about that."

"Right, you're not so sure. Because you believe that in a civilized society people should pay taxes-even plenty of taxes-to buy civility and to help out the unlucky, but otherwise people who obey just laws should be pretty much left alone. I've heard you say that."

"Yup. Pretty much."

"So if the government of a nation that calls itself civilized should let people alone, why shouldn't John Rutka let people alone?"

He raised his voice, a rare occurrence.

I'd had enough. "Well, on second thought, maybe you're right. As usual."

He snorted and began gathering up the soiled china and utensils. "Donald, I cherish you." He snorted again and turned on the hot-water tap all the way, as his mother had taught him, to prepare for scalding the dishes and cleansing them of the Trichomonas, cholera, scurvy, and athlete's foot that surely were lurking there. He said, "So it sounds as if you're going to go to work for this man you disagree with and don't like. Why?"

"I've worked for lots of people I disagreed with and didn't like. If I hadn't, I'd've starved."

"But this is a special situation. And I know you don't need the money. What you made from the Hapgoods should carry you well into the fall." This was a recent case wherein I discreetly recovered a purloined family portrait-the grandmother of a Presbyterian grande dame from Latham in a pose startling even by present-day standards and barely imaginable in 1878, the year of its creation-and received for my efforts an appropriately obscene fee.

"No, I don't need the money," I said. "Though Rutka claims he can afford it and he's paying me."

The scalding process began; you could almost hear the little screams of the rinderpest. "Then why are you doing it?" he said.

"Three reasons. One, I don't need the money now, but

I might need it later. This is a chancy business. The second reason is, Rutka is in danger and he's frightened. He needs protection

– not from criticism or maybe even from the odd sock in the jaw. But he does not deserve to be shot and killed."

"That's two reasons. What's the third?"

I knew he'd guess. "It's the least important of the three."

"Uh-huh."

"You don't know?"

The faucet was shut off, the cloud of steam began to dissipate, and he looked at me. "You want to get a look at his files."

"I'm curious. I admit it."

He began to laugh. "People deserve their privacy. Except you'd like to get just one little peek."

"Something like that."

"I know what you mean. Naturally I recognize the impulse."

"Except you would never act on it, would you?"

He thought about this. "I can't say never. I'm not perfect."

"Yes, but your imperfections lie in other areas."

This was irrelevant and unfair and I wasn't sure why I said it. He knew exactly what it meant, and briefly he was struck uncharacteristically speechless.

Timmy's imperfections had been a sensitive topic in recent months. The previous spring he had had a terrified hour-and-forty-five-minute sexual assignation with a diminutive huge-eyed Bengali economist who was passing through town. It had been Timmy's first lapse from his fourteen-year pledge of sexual fidelity. (I had made no such promise, and we had survived the onset of the HIV plague by the skin of my teeth.) Though health precautions were taken, he had done it, he immediately confessed, when he'd become unhinged, he said, by the little professor's uncanny resemblance to the district poultry officer Timmy had had the unrequited hots for in Visakhapatnam in 1968.

It may have been the briefest midlife-crisis fling on record, and it was only minimally hurtful to me-except to the extent that the incident was so out of character I feared that Timmy might be coming down with Alzheimer's, rare as it is among men in their forties. The event passed quickly by and was rarely referred to anymore, except on those occasions when I would get to point out that even a man educated by Jesuits could make a mistake. "Yes, every fourteen years," was the usual reply to this.

This time he was late for work, he said, and didn't have time for a nervous jocular exchange at his expense. He trotted upstairs to finish getting into his legislative aide's duds. With an hour to kill before I headed out to Rutka's house in Handbag, I read the newspaper account of Rutka's run-in with "an assailant possibly angered by exposure of his homosexuality." When Timmy sped through, I kissed him, careful not to leave egg on his lip. end user

4

The first thing Rutka said was, "I want to write you a check for the retainer. Will two thousand be enough?"

"We can work that out. Five hundred should do for now. Tell me about your visit from the Handbag police."

It was mid-morning, cloudless and heating up fast, and we were seated on the screened-in back porch of the old Rutka home on Elmwood Place, a short street of angular frame single-family homes separated by narrow lawns and driveways leading to small garages at the rear of each property. The elms of the street name apparently had succumbed to blight, but young maples lent some shade to the well-kept houses, whose cozy front porches were fortified by puffy hydrangea bushes and bosomy heaps of respectable shrubs. It felt like an unlikely locale for a Queer Nation headquarters, but maybe that was the point.

Each house had a concrete walk leading down to the street, like a tasteful necktie. Some were lined with zinnias and marigolds in lurid full bloom. The flowers lent a note of welcome to the neighborhood, though as I'd driven up no human being was visible. Up the street a gray cat had scratched a hole in a garbage bag left at curbside and was rummaging through the spillage. The only sound was from a dozen or so air conditioners scarfing up what was left of the Mideastern oil reserves in atonal tandem.

Rutka, pale but otherwise shapely and fit in cut-offs and a tank top, was sprawled along an old metal fifties-era porch glider on a bed of cushions that looked as if they'd been dragged down from the attic every summer since the glider was purchased. His wounded appendage lolled over the side of the glider below a sinewy leg and well-turned, muscular thigh that was not the result of a health-club regimen, I guessed, but of a decade of plowing up and down hospital corridors eight to twelve hours a day.

I sat in a metal rocker and helped myself from time to time to an M amp;M from a large dish on an end table next to Rutka. He ate them by the fistful, as if the medical advice he'd received had been to stay off the wounded foot and eat plenty of candy. My peripheral vision searched his torso for love handles but none were visible. I chewed and swallowed my own M amp;M's slowly so as to distribute their effects evenly.

"The stupid cops thought what I thought they would think," Rutka said. "That I shot myself, or Eddie shot me, for the publicity and the martyrdom. God, I'm mad but I'm not crazy."

"They said that straight out?"

"They didn't have to. They asked me if either Eddie or I owned a firearm, and they kept asking me to repeat the story of what happened, over and over, as if they couldn't quite believe it, or they were trying to trip me up."

"Did they trip you up?"

"Look, I know what happened. No, they did not trip me up." Rutka's left eye wandered off to take in the old grape arbor, heavy with bird-pecked pale produce, that extended down the backyard away from the porch, and his right eye peered at me beadily. "I went outside, somebody shot me, and a car drove away. How could anybody trip me up? Even if I was making it up, it's too simple."

"Tell me again everything that happened from beginning to end. Start when Eddie came home from work. Is he at work now?"

"He works every day, including Saturday, from seven-thirty to four, later when they get busy. Yesterday was slow and Eddie was home by four-thirty." He repeated the story he had told me the night before in the Albany Med parking lot: Eddie's arrival home; the plan to walk down to Konven-You-Rama; stepping off the front steps; bang; car with bad muffler speeds off; Eddie comes out, finds Rutka sprawled; cops, ambulance arrive; shell found in gutter by patrolman.

Rutka's story sounded identical to the narrative I'd heard the night before. A new detail cropped up here and there; others were dropped. It sounded real, natural, truthful.

"You said the cops asked if you own a firearm. Do you?"

"I told them I didn't. But I do. I guess I can tell you."

"Oh, great."

"Here," he said, and slid a. 38 Smith and Wesson revolver out from under the cushions.

I examined the weapon, which was fully loaded, and said, "Where did this thing come from?"

He was nonchalant. "Around the corner from my old apartment on a Hundred and Sixth Street in New York.

I bought it retail, I guess you could say. These things are easier to come by in that neighborhood than take-out Szechuan."

"It's not registered anywhere?"

A mirthless laugh. " 'Register criminals, not firearms,' right, Strachey? How could I be a First Amendment purist and scoff at the Second?"

"You're right. Criminals should be required to register their crimes in advance and observe a seven-day waiting period before committing them." I returned the revolver and Rutka stuffed it back under the cushions. "How come you felt you needed one of these?" I asked.

"In New York," he said, "I was mugged twice by gangs of kids. After the second time, when they threw me in the gutter and hit me on the neck with a chain, I bought this gun from a guy I knew at the local bodega. Of course, it didn't do me any good. It was too much trouble to drag it around and I always left it at home. You can't hide a shoulder holster under a nurse's uniform."

"What was the caliber of the slug the cops found yesterday?"

He shrugged. "They didn't tell me. But it wouldn't have come from this gun. That I know."

"Because?"

"Because this gun was up on a closet shelf in our room. I brought it down this morning when Eddie left for work. I didn't really know how scared I was until Eddie left and I was alone. I have to admit, I really started to freak. That's when I called you. And I got the gun out and loaded it."

Rutka was looking directly at me now with both eyes, though if a wild man suddenly arrived on the scene spraying hot lead it wasn't at all certain where an excited Rutka's gaze might land. I said, "You have one eye that wanders. If you had to shoot that gun, how would you aim it?"

"With my right eye," he said. "It's the left one that gets away. That'd be no problem."

"Makes sense. What about the actual bullet that nicked your ankle? Have they found it yet?"

He took another fistful of candies, chomped on them, and said, "Two bozos were out here with tape measures and geometry-class instruments at six this morning, but they didn't find anything. They said they thought the bullet might have buried itself in the lawn. I got the impression that if I'd been shot through the pancreas they'd've dug up the lawn. But they said there was no reason to make a mess in the neighborhood if they didn't have to. They went through the motions."

I asked him for the names of the investigating officers and he said, "Just the chief-Bub Bailey-and the patrolman who was here last night, Octavio Reed. They only have one detective in Handbag, and he's on vacation until Labor Day."

The name Octavio Reed meant something to me, but I couldn't remember exactly what. I said, "They told you that?"

"They were civil," Rutka said with what looked like a trace of disappointment. "The chief mentioned Dad, of course. It was obvious he wasn't going to tell me what he really thought of me in the presence of Dad's ghost. The reactionaries who control this country are right in one way-what they call family values are worth something. Just make sure you're a member of the family.

And that you don't have one of those families that, when they find out you're queer, they kick you out on the street."

"I take it that wasn't the case with you."

His face tightened and he said, "No. I was lucky in that respect. Actually, they didn't know. I was pretty fucked up as a kid. I kept everything hidden. My first experiences were not what you would call ideal. I didn't really come to terms with my sexuality until I was in nursing school in 1980 and met some gay people who had their shit together. And even then I didn't come out and start thinking of myself as gay until I hit New York.

"I got down there just in time for the plague, which was horrible, but fortunately I met Eddie a couple of months after I arrived.

He was just out of the Marine Corps and really ready to let loose too. We hardly got out of bed the first month we knew each other, we had so much sex and emotion pent up inside us. I brought him home whenever I came up, and everybody in my family just sort of knew. Ann said they figured it out when I decided to become a nurse. How's that for sexual-orientation stereotyping?"

"Competent enough."

"So they knew, and it seemed to be okay, just as long as nobody spoke the dreaded word."

"And you never spoke it?"

"Nah. Not in Handbag. Not until later, in New York, when I went to a couple of ACT-UP meetings and started to understand how all-pervasive homophobia is in this society and how it kills people. Then I spoke the word."

"I suppose," I said, "Chief Bailey was forced to speak it when he was here, or at least to allude to it."

Rutka sneered. "He said he thought the shooting might have had something to do with my being 'an activist.' That's all he said, 'an activist.' "

"And you conceded there might be a connection?"

"He asked me for the names of anyone who had threatened me in recent months, and I gave him my list."

"You have a little list."

"These are the ones who I know who they are. I've gotten so many anonymous threats in the past year I've lost count."

He reached over the edge of the glider, retrieved from the end table a photocopied single sheet of paper, and passed it to me. As I read over it, Rutka scooped up another handful of M amp;M's and crunched on them noisily while I studied his list of names and brief biographical descriptions. The list had on it the state senate aide, the TV weatherman, and seven other names I recognized from Rutka's Cityscape outing column and from Queers-creed.

I folded and pocketed the list and said, "These are all people you've already outed. You haven't been threatened by anybody who hadn't been outed yet but was afraid you might go after them? Somebody in your files?"

"No. Not yet."

"Where do you keep these famous files, anyway?"

"Hidden."

"Here in the house?"

"Upstairs. I'll show you. They're locked up. Eddie has a key. I have a key. And I'll show you where there's another one. Nobody else has ever seen the files."

"I'm flattered."

"You should be. I take my responsibilities with the data that I've gathered very, very seriously."

This was an interpretation of Rutka's activities that would have been challenged through clenched teeth by many in Albany, but I was now his security consultant and not his conscience, or linguist, and I let it go.

"How did you compile these files?" I said. "How do you dig up all this dirt on people?"

"I'm surprised to hear you call it dirt," he said, looking annoyed. "That's a retrograde term I'd expect to hear from a person who has internalized his or her own homophobia."

"That's what I meant. It's dirt to them."

"Exactly. So, Strachey. You're a detective. If you were going to build up a set of files on homophobic closeted people, how would you go about it?"

"I'd keep my eyes open and ask a lot of questions wherever gay people congregated. I'd stake out cruising areas and see who turned up. I'd make myself available to people who wanted to sell information that somebody somewhere would consider damaging. And of course I'd cultivate in-the-know gay people who share my beliefs about outing or who might be brought around to my way of thinking."

He nodded. "You've got it."

"I'd build up a network of informants, too. In the police department, among the press, maybe in the area's hotels and motels, where lots of gay people are employed, and closeted gay people show up for trysts wearing shades and red wigs that don't fool sharp-eyed nosy desk clerks and room-service waiters and busboys."

Another nod.

I said, "I guess the motives of your informants don't count for much. Just so they deliver the goods."

He looked at me with both eyes and said gravely, "I occupy the high moral ground in this. It doesn't matter if many of my informants don't. They can deal with their own consciences. I'll deal with mine. I think of tips from sleazy people as just that tips, leads. I would never out anybody on the say-so of just one person, even if that person was sincere and reliable-which some of them are. They aren't all scuzzbags.

"That's why it pisses me off that people say I use McCarthyite tactics. Joe McCarthy was reckless and sloppy. He'd go after somebody on the basis of anonymous calls or letters from crackpot organizations. I would never do anything like that. The idea of it makes me sick."

When I thought about it later, Rutka's indignantly drawn fine distinction between his approach and Joe McCarthy's kept blurring in my mind. But as Rutka sat there on a sunny Wednesday morning shaking his head in disgust over McCarthy's failure to double-check his sources, he came across as the consummate professional: exacting, judicious, fair-minded, wise: the Benjamin Cardozo of outing.

I said, "Well, John, whatever I might think about your outing campaign and the way you go about it, you've convinced me that I can rely on your skills as a researcher-reporter. That's quite a data bank you must have stored away up there. And I guess I agree it's all but certain that the name of the person who shot you is buried somewhere inside those files. So if I'm going to help keep you from getting shot again, we should get to it. It's time for me to take a look at those files."

Rutka seemed to pause for just an instant to consider the gravity of the step he was about to take, and then he swung both feet onto the floor, sat up, and reached for my hand. end user