Текст книги "Third man out"

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

5

Rutka slid up the stairs backwards on his seat, pushing himself upward with the good foot. On the second floor he pulled himself upright and hobbled into a dim bedroom with drawn shades that had been a teen-aged girl's in the early seventies and had been frozen in time: orange shag throw rug; pink chenille bedspread with a heap of stuffed animals on the pillows; a stack of Carole King records; an Osmond Brothers poster on the wall; some group photos showing the Handbag High cheerleaders hoisting their pom-poms and thrusting up their breasts with military precision.

"Your sister's room?"

"You are good."

Rutka unzipped the belly of a stuffed hippopotamus and pulled out a set of three keys. "Now you know where a set of keys is, in case I'm not here."

Down the hall, he unlocked the attic door with two of the keys and we climbed up, him on his seat. The wall of dry heat that hit us when we got to the top felt like a visit to Khartoum. I helped support Rutka and we bent low so as not to have our skulls pierced by roofing nails. Past the piles of old furniture and boxes labeled "XMAS" and "GRANDMA," at what I took to be the rear of the attic if my orientation was correct, was an old World War II-vintage desk.

A light bulb on a wire dangled overhead. Heaps of old Cityscapes and Queerscreeds were on the floor off to one side, and on the other stood a two-drawer metal filing cabinet. The heat was awful under the uninsulated shingled roof, and Rutka switched on a box floor fan that just blew the hot air around; I tried to remember the Arab word for the madness caused by this type of wind.

Rutka used a third key on his chain to unlock the file cabinet. Down below a phone began to ring, but Rutka gestured to never mind. "The machine will pick it up." He perched on the edge of the desk and said, "This is it. The famous files."

I slid open the top drawer. It was jam-packed with file folders arranged alphabetically by outee.

"The ones with the red tags have already been done," he said.

"I'd have expected an up-to-date guy like you, John, to be computerized."

"My financial resources are not unlimited, despite what I'm paying you. I'll stay here while you look through them. You'll probably have some questions."

We were both sweating now from the heat. The main effect of the fan was to dry the sweat on our body surfaces and blow occasional droplets onto the stack of files I spread out on the desk. My neck itched and we both stank. Rutka seated himself on an old kitchen chair next to the desk and made notes in the margins of a file he retrieved from a desktop box labeled "CURRENT" while I spread out the A's.

"What's that?" Rutka said, listening.

I heard it too, the sound of glass breaking, a bottle or jar smashing.

We listened.

"I'll check," I said.

Before I even made it to the stairwell, a smoke alarm down below began to wail. I hurtled down to the second floor, and even faster to the first, where dark smoke was boiling into the kitchen. Out on the back porch, flames, fed by what smelled like gasoline, were roaring up from the floor. The glider cushions were ablaze, and even the M amp;M's, drenched by the blazing fluid, were melting and popping in the billowing fire and smoke.

I grabbed the canister fire extinguisher by the kitchen door, yanked the release handle, and directed the hose at the conflagration.

White foam shot out with enough force to make me bobble the awkward tube, but I regained my aim and sprayed the glider and floor repeatedly with the retardant chemical. The flames vanished in spots, only to spring up again when I shifted my aim.

Hacking and gasping and weeping from the smoke, I doused the area with chemical until the fire was extinguished. I found a phone in the kitchen, dialed 911, and asked for the Handbag Fire Department to come out and make sure the fire was out. Then I examined the damage.

Rutka, having made his way down from the attic, appeared in the hallway leading to the kitchen and peered at me with a look of horror.

"Oh, Jesus, what happened? What blew up? Oh, God, now what!"

"I hate to tell you."

"What? What happened?"

"There's a hole in the back porch screen, and there's broken glass on the porch floor. It looks as if it was done deliberately with a Molotov cocktail."

He fell against the doorsill. "Oh, God. I did it. Now I really did it!"

"It looks that way."

The smoke alarms were still wailing and I got up on a chair to disengage the one in the kitchen. I was about to head upstairs to shut off the alarm there when sirens sounded out on the street. I thought of something and sped back out to the porch and snatched up Rutka's hot revolver with a towel and handed them both to him to hide. He flung them into the oven and slammed the door shut as I went on up to disengage the second-floor alarm. When I came back, a police cruiser was parked outside, lights flashing, and Rutka was opening the front door for a Handbag patrolman who looked dimly familiar. He caught my glance and blinked. Then a fire engine roared up in a manner that might have successfully intimidated a small blaze into extinction. As the rescuers barged in, Rutka directed them to the rear of the house.

To me, Rutka said, "Maybe you'd better lock the attic door."

He passed me the keys and I moved up the stairs quickly. I secured the attic and was headed back down when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror at the end of the hall. My face was sooty and my hair was a tropical rainforest. I dashed into the not-so-fastidiously-kept bathroom and washed the grime off my face as well as I could, drying off with one of the rancid towels heaped on the floor by the shower. I dumped the stale water from a grimy glass on a shelf by the sink and gulped tapwater from it, salve for my dehydrated throat and insides.

Back downstairs, the firefighters had declared the blaze extinguished, but for safety's sake they were wetting down the smoky and charred area of the porch with a fluid from their own canister. Rutka was speaking with the fireman in charge and explaining what had happened.

"That's what it looks like to me," the fireman said disgustedly. "I'm going out to call the fire marshal right now. Don't touch anything out there. They'll need to check the place out for what they can find."

"I won't touch it."

"You can air the place out-set up some fans. Nobody saw it happen?"

"We were upstairs," Rutka said. "We heard the bang and my friend here ran down and put the fire out. I've got a wounded foot."

The fireman looked down and shook his head. "You were lucky. You were just darn lucky somebody was here."

Rutka looked at his foot and said, "I know."

"You ought to call your insurance man," the fireman said. "The damage should be covered."

The Handbag police patrolman who had come flying up Elmwood Place just ahead of the fire engine had been entering and exiting the house busily throughout the activities of the past fifteen minutes, and now he returned and was listening intently to our conversation. "OCTAVIO T. REED," read the nametag on his uniform. He had slicked-back dark hair, and liquid brown eyes in a broad face that was bunched up now in a kind of quizzical squint. His shoulders were slumped forward almost disconsolately, it seemed. I remembered now where I knew him from: we'd met at the Watering Hole and spent half a night together at my Morton Avenue apartment in 1975 or '76, after which, I thought I recalled, he said he had to get back to his recent bride in Handbag.

While the fireman went on talking to Rutka about insurance and cleanup matters, Reed beckoned and I followed him outside.

"Long time no see," I said.

He glanced around nervously. "I don't go out anymore. I've got kids in school and I'm a police officer and-you know."

"How long has it been?"

"It was July of nineteen seventy-six," he said. "You're one of the ones I like to remember."

"It's pretty clear to me, too. I don't go out anymore either. I've got a boyfriend. I met him not long after I met you."

He looked at me wistfully. "All that time."

"Are you still married?"

"Sure."

"Is it a good marriage? I mean otherwise."

"Yeah," he said. "That's the trouble."

The firemen were coming out now and starting to pack up their pumper. Reed looked around and said, "Are you still a P.I.? I've seen your name in the paper."

"I am."

His look darkened. "You're not working for this Rutka, are you?"

"As of today, I am. On account of what happened last night-the shooting. He hired me."

"Maybe I shouldn't be telling you this, but I hate to see you get involved with this guy. I was just out going around the neighborhood trying to turn up anybody who saw anything at the time the fire started, and I got one. There's an old lady over on Maplewood Place whose bathroom window looks out on Rutka's backyard here. She says she saw somebody go through the backyard and up behind Rutka's garage before the alarm sounded and the fire department got here. She says it was Eddie Sandifer."

"She saw him herself? She's sure it was Sandifer?"

"That's what she says."

"Interesting." "Be careful of those two."

"I've been being careful of them, but maybe not careful enough." end user

6

Reed got into his cruiser and rode away, and I went back into the house and looked up the Kopy-King number. I checked my watch-11:57 A.M., about half an hour since the fire started-and dialed. Sandifer answered.

"Hi, Eddie, this is Don Strachey. Do you know what's happened out here? I'm at the house in Handbag."

"What happened? What do you mean?"

"There's been a fire. It's okay, it was put out without much damage, but somebody threw a firebomb onto the back porch. It looks like another attack on John and it was sort of a close call."

I could hear his breathing quicken. "Is John all right?"

"For now. Later I'll try to get him to a safer place."

"I've got my lunch break," Sandifer said. "I'm coming out. Don't leave till I get there, okay?"

"How long does it take to drive out here?" I said.

"Twenty minutes. I'm leaving right now."

"See you soon."

Rutka was seated at the big mahogany table in the dining room looking morose and going through some papers he'd taken out of a drawer in the sideboard. "I guess I'd better call the insurance agency. Even though those people are such a hassle."

I said, "I phoned Eddie. He's driving out."

"I know. I heard you."

"He's concerned about you, he says."

He continued to peruse the documents. "If he wants to come out, fine. Though you're here now." He looked up. "You're not crapping out on me, are you? Now that I'm relying on you more than ever?"

I looked at him but didn't answer.

"I don't have any friends in this town," he said.

"You do have enemies. That I believe."

Now he looked worried. "Is there something you don't believe?"

I seated myself in the chair across from Rutka and looked into his face and said, "The cop who was here asked around the neighborhood for people who might have seen something at the time of the fire. He found one."

Rutka blinked. "He did?"

"A woman on Maplewood Place was looking out her bathroom window, which overlooks your backyard."

"Vera Renfrew."

"She told the cop she saw someone she recognized cut through her back yard and into yours before the fire started. Guess who she says she saw?"

"I don't know. I'd love to know. Who?"

"Eddie. She saw Eddie Sandifer."

He slumped forward and shook his tresses. "Oh, no."

"Can you explain that, John?"

He kept shaking his head. "She told this to that dumb cop?" He was grinning stupidly.

"That's what I've been told. The police will pass it on to the arson investigation unit."

Rutka suddenly went all red and he glared at me fiercely. "I'm being set up," he said. "I'm being goddamn fucking set up." His left eye headed west.

"By Eddie?"

"No, no!" he snarled, his dark locks trembling. "Of course not by Eddie! I'm being set up by Bruno Slinger, that sleazoid scumbag! Slinger and Grey Koontz are trying to frame me."

"Who," I said tightly, "is Grey Koontz?" My head had been feeling hot and greasy on the outside and now it was starting to feel hot and greasy on the inside, too.

"Koontz is one of Slinger's tricks and a dirtbag from the word go. He looks a lot like Eddie, except maybe younger, maybe twenty-four or – five. From a distance, or even in a dark bar or someplace, people sometimes get them mixed up. Slinger must have planned the whole thing after I outed him. He's one of the ones who threatened me and he is absolutely ruthless, ask anybody. It was probably Koontz or Slinger who shot me last night, and now they're trying to frame Eddie, the fucking degenerates!"

I looked into the one of Rutka's eyes that was looking at me and said, as calmly as I could, "Are you using me?"

"No. Not underhandedly, if that's what you suspect."

"Don't. I'll catch on. And then you'll have another enemy."

"I wouldn't. I know you're sharp, Strachey. That's why I hired you. If I wanted to run a con on somebody, I'd do it with those stupid Handbag cops. Trust me."

I said, "The Handbag cops aren't doing badly at all, so far. And it strains credulity way past the limit that the famous senatorial aide you outed should have a boyfriend who looks just like your boyfriend and would be in a position to frame you. That's quite a coincidence."

"They're not boyfriends," Rutka said, and turned to snatch a Snickers bar from the sideboard behind him.

"Koontz is an occasional trick, that's all. It's in the files-you'll see it. Slinger's current boyfriend is Ronnie Linkletter. I can't imagine that wimp Linkletter coming after me. But Slinger and Koontz-those two douche-bags are capable of anything."

He went to work on the candy bar and I sat there watching him eat. "Are you hungry?" he said. "Help yourself."

"No."

He finished the sweet. "You don't believe me, do you?" he said, giving me his poor-misunderstood-thing look.

I said, "It's about the dumbest explanation I ever heard."

"No, it's not," he said, looking bitter now. "It's the obvious explanation. Just because you've never seen Grey Koontz, you don't believe it. What kind of solipsistic bullshit is that? If you have no personal knowledge of something, then it can't be true? I thought you were smarter than that. What other explanation could there be, anyway? Eddie was at work. He was there when you called."

"I called half an hour after the fire started. It takes twenty minutes from here to Kopy-King. Eddie could have been back with plenty of time to spare."

He waved this away. "All right, he could have done a lot of things, but he didn't. Look, the cops will check Eddie out, and where he was at the time of the fire, and then you'll be satisfied. In the meantime, who knows what that fucking Slinger has in store for me next. If you want to be skeptical, be skeptical. I don't care. Spend as much time investigating Eddie as investigating me. Just help protect me, will you? If you want to think of it as protecting me from myself, go ahead and think of it that way. I'm going to write you a check right now." He pulled out a checkbook from under the stack of documents.

I said nothing and watched him write the check, and I thought about it. Then I made a decision. More out of curiosity over what I had come to see as a fascinating disturbed personality with a tiny role to play in gay history-more for that than for any other reason (such as my wanting to get a longer, closer look at the despicable files), I said, "John, I'm willing to work for you for the next twenty-four hours."

He said, "That's a start."

"I'm not going to cash the check," I said. "And if at the end of twenty-four hours I have concluded that you have lied to me and involved me in an elaborate hoax, I'll return the check personally and I'll stomp on your shot foot. How's that?"

He handed me the check. "I understand your position," he said. "You have a reputation to protect and you have to do what you have to do. But I'm not worried. I don't have much to fall back on, but I do have my personal integrity. And if that's your only concern, I'm on firm ground. Just let me know when your belief in me has been restored."

Restored? I said, "Do you want to stay at my place overnight? You'll be safe there, I'm certain."

"That's not really necessary. Eddie will be here and we can take turns sleeping. I think my gun was damaged in the fire, but Eddie has another one."

"Registered?"

"No. From the bodega, like mine."

"I'll try to get the Handbag cops to increase their coverage of the house. After the fire, that should be no problem."

He agreed and I phoned the Handbag police station. I reached Octavio Reed, who said, "Before we do anything at all out there, you should talk to the chief. He knows of you and he wants to meet you. Don't say anything about-you know."

"No way."

"Chief Bailey wants to see you this afternoon if you can make it. He's out right now. Can you come at two?"

"I'll be there."

"Just don't trust those two," he said, and rang off.

"I'm meeting the chief this afternoon about arranging additional protection," I told Rutka, and could see him working up to a fit over the delay, when Sandifer walked in.

"Oh, jeez, look at the porch! This is– Oh, jeez!"

"It's a mess," Rutka said.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, but there's a ridiculous new development that I should tell you about."

"What?"

"Vera Renfrew told the police she saw somebody suspicious go down her yard and up ours before the bomb was thrown."

Sandifer stared. "She did?"

"She said she saw you."

Sandifer's face fell forward, along with much of the rest of his upper body. "Oh, that's just great," he said finally. "Jeez, why would she say a thing like that? That's crazy."

"I guess it was somebody who looked like you," Rutka said.

After a brief, frozen instant, Sandifer said, "Oh, no, not-"

"It makes sense, doesn't it?"

"Grey Koontz."

They went on in this vein for some minutes, and I kept thinking, They had a scam worked out that went awry and now they're making it up as they go along. end user

7

The insurance agent soon showed up, trying to look delighted about shelling out a few thousand of the home office's zillions, and while he and Sandifer and Rutka surveyed the reeking and charred mess on the back porch, I went upstairs.

En route to the attic I looked into Rutka's and Sandifer's room and spotted the telephone answering machine Rutka had mentioned earlier. The message light was blinking. This had to have been the call Rutka and I had heard from the attic a few minutes before the fire broke out, and which Rutka had said not to bother with.

I pushed the playback button. There were a couple of clicks and that was it. The caller had hung up.

In the attic the sauna heat hit me again. It was hard to imagine that men paid large sums of money to join fashionable clubs so that they could sit around in places like this and perspire recreationally. I peeled off my sopping polo shirt and hung it over the front of the whirring box fan.

The file I pulled out first, on Bruno Slinger, was thicker than most. It contained press clippings on the Republican state senator Slinger worked for, and Slinger, as the senator's occasional spokesman, was quoted from time to time, always in support of conservative causes: anti-abortion, anti-social services, and, amazingly, antigay. News photos of the senator in groups often included Bruno Slinger in the background.

Slinger had an easy, smug look in his press clips, but in his other photos he was more somber. In one Polaroid his cheek was bulging with the erect member of a physically fit Caucasian male whose bare upper body was out of the shot. The member was condomless, not a good idea anymore. The notation on the back said "Slinger and G. Koontz" and gave a date from the previous fall.

Handwritten notes by Rutka paired Slinger's name with those of a dozen or so other men, with dates and locations noted, most of them motels in the Albany area. The name Grey Koontz did crop up several times. I reexamined the photo with "G. Koontz" on the back to see if the man in it resembled Sandifer, and while their builds were similar, the focus on the man's organ rather than his face made evaluation difficult. Still, it occurred to me that Rutka and Sandifer might actually be telling the truth about a Slinger-Koontz frame-up attempt.

Several handwritten letters were in the Slinger file, each in a different script. One, dated the previous October, began: "Hi, John.

Just thought you'd like to know that Bruno Slinger is a cocksucker." It was signed "A. Friend." There was no return address; the mailing envelope stapled to the letter was postmarked Albany.

Another note read: "Bruno Slinger is gay. Check it out." No signature or return address on that one either. A third, also unsigned and from Albany, informed the reader that "Bruno Slinger goes for boys." This could have meant underage youths or boys of thirty-five; the rest of the letter described in unoriginal language Sling-er's sexual practices and gave no further clue to his age preferences.

There were several similar letters offering firsthand knowledge of Bruno Slinger's homosexuality, and there were fifteen or twenty letters-often typewritten and literate-lacking evidence of personal experience but insisting on the fact of Slinger's queerness just the same. Many of these ill-wishers were especially venomous and used words such as "twisted" and "monstrous" and "evil" to describe Slinger's hypocrisy.

The Slinger file also included a note in Rutka's handwriting describing an anonymous phone threat, which Rutka speculated had come from Slinger. The caller had said, "You're going to get your balls ripped off for this one," and the call had come just a day after Slinger's outing in Cityscape.

I flipped back to the file for Ronnie Linkletter, the Channel Eight weatherman Rutka said Slinger was now involved with.

Linkletter's file was a thick one too. It contained a multicolor promotional brochure put out by Channel Eight detailing the weatherman's part in the station's "We're Hometown Folks" campaign. This was where the station's news "personalities" went out into the community and showed, a tad superfluously, that the news broadcast by Channel Eight's newscasters existed in a context not of history but of themselves. They looked happy about this, and according to the ratings, the station's viewers seemed satisfied too. Ronnie Linkletter's part in the "We're Hometown Folks" effort was to go into clubs and schools and relate odd facts of meteorology.

Linkletter also was as comfortable in front of a Polaroid as he was on the Channel Eight news set. Ronnie was belly down in his single blurry snapshot, butt raised for the insertion of a sizeable organ whose owner's face was above the frame.

Linkletter, too, had been tattled on by anonymous letter writers. One began: "Dear Mr. Rutka-I have been reading your column and agree with you one thousand percent that queer people have to rise up or die. A life of oppression is no life at all…" The writer went on to proclaim his philosophical fraternalism with Rutka and then offered the name of a "media celebrity who has not accepted his own queerness but should be made to do so because he is well-liked in the community and would further establish queer omnipresence in the public mentality." The name was Linkletter's and the writer asserted that he once spent a night with Linkletter in the Fountain of Eden Motel on Route 5.

There were other, similar letters-Linkletter attracted a more casual, less incensed type of snitch than Bruno Slinger did-and an assortment of dated notes in Rutka's handwriting describing phone calls about Linkletter. One sheet of paper labeled "From JG Linkletter at motel with A" consisted of a long list of forty or fifty dates, each of them a week apart.

Linkletter's file also included an issue of the February third Cityscape in which Linkletter was outed, and a memo to the file on a phone call from Linkletter to Rutka after the outing, in which Rutka described Linkletter's rage and his stated intention to "bash your brains in." Rough language for a Hometown Folk.

I got out the list Rutka had given me with the names of the other people he claimed had threatened him. Besides Slinger's and Linkletter's, seven threats had been received. The two face-to-face encounters had been with the Times Union editorial writer, who met Rutka at Queequeg's restaurant and screamed, "You oughta have your black heart ripped out!" – no Pulitzer material in that-and with a Colonie auto-parts-store manager, who ran into Rutka in Macy's just before Christmas and told him he wouldn't be alive six months from then. Rutka had outlived that prediction already by more than a month.

The other five threats by identifiable people all came by phone. All threatened violent acts, even death; they were from a Schenectady orthodontist, an Albany court bailiff, an elementary-school principal in Troy, a state university physicist, and a retired professional hockey player.

I went through the files and took copious notes on all nine of the men who had threatened John Rutka-for what it was worth.

The attacks on Rutka could as easily have been made by one of the "countless," as he'd put it, anonymous callers who'd threatened him. Or by someone who had never threatened him at all. There was always that.

I flipped through a sampling of the other files. Some of the names I recognized from Rutka's columns in Cityscape and Queerscreed. Others, unouted as yet, were men and women I knew. My stomach began to churn, partly from hunger and partly from disgust, and my impulse was to alert these people immediately that they were on Rutka's list of possible outees. The ethical ramifications of my position with Rutka were becoming more complex by the minute.

That complexity was not lessened when I flipped through the front of the file one last time in search of a name that might mean something to me. I came to another one I recognized and gawked at for some seconds. Here was a file labeled "CALLAHAN, TIMOTHY."

The little bio note attached to Timothy Callahan's folder described him as an Albany man in his forties who worked as the chief legislative aide to New York Assemblyman Myron Lipschutz, and who resided in a house on Crow Street with his lover of fourteen years, private investigator Donald Strachey. The only piece of paper in the folder was a single phone memo dated April 25th: "Parmalee Plaza Hotel informant IDs Callahan entering room with guest who informant says he had the night before."

Poor Timmy. Just once he had embraced in terror the ghost of the district poultry officer he had lain dreaming about uselessly long ago in Visakhapatnam, and in doing so had exorcised that ghost, and now he had his name on an overbearing twit's hit list in an attic in Handbag. This was not fair. My opinion of John Rutka, which had seemed to bottom out in recent hours, began again to slide.

I stuffed my notes in my pocket, put my still-damp shirt back on, switched off the fan and the lights, and returned to the second floor, careful to double-lock the attic door. I zipped the keys back inside the hippo's belly.

With the insurance agent on the way down the front walk toward his burgundy Lincoln, I said to Rutka in the front hall, "My boyfriend's in your file."

A little dry laugh. "I thought you'd get a charge out of. that." Sandifer stood at the end of the hall grinning nervously.

"I don't."

"Oh, what the– It's just a fucking file!" He hobbled into the living room too fast, nearly stumbled, and went down hard on the couch. "There's nothing in the file except that one fucking call. What was I gonna do with it, anyway? I can't out somebody who's already out, can I? You two are the most famous queer couple in Albany. In the paper they refer to you as 'the Albany private investigator and acknowledged homosexual,' and Callahan is almost as notorious as you are. So please don't go all self-righteous on me, Strachey, because I would find that very, very hard to take."

I said, "What if I hadn't known?"

He rolled his eyes and sighed grandly. "Well, of course you'd know. Or if you didn't know, you wouldn't care. Hey, I know all about you, Strachey. You've been playing around on the side since day one, and it was only reasonable for me to assume that you and Callahan had an open relationship, and he was doing it too, and it was cool. Why are you making such a big fucking thing about this? I don't get it. I just don't get it."

He looked genuinely mystified. Sandifer came down the hall now and stood listening.

I said, "First of all, it's been years since I've had sex with men other than Timothy Callahan. For reasons of avoiding the plague, for Timmy's emotional well-being, and because it just doesn't seem to matter to me as much as it once did, I don't do it. And the fact is, he never did it. Emotionally it is not his style. But whatever the two of us do or don't do sexually, together or with others, John, the simple fact of the matter is, none of it is any of your goddamn business!"

I yelled the last part, and Rutka flinched.

Sandifer went and sat beside Rutka on the couch and took his hand and held it. Rutka's eyes were off in different directions; he began to shake his head from side to side. "Now I'm really fucked. I've alienated you, and I am totally, totally fucked. Oh, shit.

Shit, shit, shit."

I'd had enough. I said, "I think I need to get away from you, John. Before I punch your face in." Would I now have to add myself to the list of people who had threatened Rutka? "I'm going over to talk to the Handbag police about getting you some protection. I do believe, John, that you make people want to kill you, and maybe somebody really is trying to do it. You should stay here because the arson squad will be here soon. Eddie, can you wait here until I get back?"

"I'll call in at work," he said. "I can finish up some things this evening."

"Are you going to ditch me?" Rutka said, giving me the evil eye. "Because I left your boyfriend's folder in the file? I could have taken it out, you know. I thought about that. I left it in because I thought the only way you'd work with me was if I was straightforward with you and didn't hold anything back or hide anything. I guess I should have been more devious."