Текст книги "Third man out"

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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11

We drove over to Crow Street. Timmy had re-hooked up the answering machine when he arrived home from work, and now there were two messages on it. Both were from Eddie Sandifer. The first, in a tremulous voice, said, "I think somebody took John. It looks like he was kidnaped. Please, I need your help. Call me at the house as soon as you can. I'm going to call the Handbag police." The second message, delivered in a monotone, said simply, "He's dead. John's dead and I don't know what to do."

I dialed Rutka's number in Handbag.

"Yell-o."

"Eddie?"

"This is Officer Hughs of the Handbag Police Department. Who do you want?"

"Edward Sandifer."

"Hold on."

Half a minute later, an all-but-lifeless voice: "Yes?"

"This is Strachey. What happened?"

"John's dead. Somebody killed him."

"That's– I can hardly believe it."

"I know."

"He was in a fire?"

"They took him from here and tied him up in an old house and burned it down."

"Oh, hell."

"Can you come out?"

"I'm surprised you want me to."

"I do. Please come out."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes. Do they have any idea who did it?"

"No. They keep questioning me. I don't know how much to say."

"How much to say about what?"

"Well, there are some things you should know."

"Uh-huh. Have the cops asked for the files?"

"They don't seem to know about them. They keep asking for the names of people who threatened John."

"Don't mention the files. I'll be out."

"Thank you. Please hurry."

We were on 787 North in three minutes with the windows down and the hot night air loud in our faces. My headache was back and I was unable to answer Timmy's questions.

"Was Sandifer there when Rutka was dragged away?"

"I don't know."

"Where was the fire?"

"In an old house. That's all I know."

"Was he badly burned? How do they know it was Rutka's body?"

"I don't know. I know what you're thinking."

"I guess they'll be thorough-the medical examiner. Whoever confirms the identification of the body."

"They tend to be. And in this case they'll be extra thorough."

A police cruiser turned out of Elmwood Place as we turned in, and as we pulled up in front of the house a second car made a U at the end of the block and came back down and out of the neighborhood.

"Are they gone?" Sandifer said as we came in the front door.

"They're gone. Who was here?"

"John's sister Ann and Bub Bailey and another policeman." He fell back against the wall, buried his face in his hands, and heaved, up and down.

After a time, I said, "You'd better sit down, Eddie," and led him by the arm into the living room, where he collapsed in a chair, snuffling. The charred odor from the morning fire on the back porch filled the house, and it was as if it was the stench of Rutka's remains.

"I'm sorry, Eddie. What can I tell you."

"Nothing. What can anybody say? Maybe I shouldn't have gone to work tonight and left him alone. But he said I should go ahead. And there wasn't anything he had to worry about. Not really."

"There wasn't?"

He looked up at me and let loose with something that was half sigh, half shudder. "Well, you abandoned him, and you didn't even know."

"Know what?"

"I mean, you didn't know for sure."

"What? That you threw the firebomb today and shot John in the foot last night?"

He glanced at Timmy. "He's okay," I said.

Sandifer looked away. "It was John's idea," he said in a tremulous voice, "not mine. I always told him gay people didn't have to pretend to be under attack from homophobes. All we had to do was go out in public and not hide the fact we were gay and sooner or later we'd get our faces punched in, if that's what he wanted to prove. But he said there was never enough evidence, or gay people were afraid to report it, or the cops would ignore it-if they weren't the ones doing the beating themselves. So sometimes you had to do 'a little reality-based charade,' was how John put it.

Shooting him in the foot last night practically made me want to throw up."

"Staging a fag-bashing does seem a little redundant these days," I said. "And what was my role supposed to be in all this? Why was I lied to and manipulated and conned into the scam? To lend credibility?"

He flushed and couldn't look up at me. "That and to get feedback from the cops. John thought they'd tell you things they wouldn't tell him. And he thought all the people who had threatened him would really be freaked if they thought you might be coming after them."

I felt a rush of fury at Rutka for being dead and not available for me to get my hands around his throat. I said, "You two lunkheads sure botched the whole thing real good, didn't you? You got away with the shooting last night, so far, but your neighbor spotted you on your way to toss the bomb today. Have you confessed to the police?"

His head jerked up. "No! Jesus! I don't want to go to prison. Anyway, now there really is a killer."

"And once he's identified, he might as well take the rap for the two unsuccessful attempts, is that it?"

"Well-why not? Oh, I don't know. What difference does it make? What difference does anything make anymore!"

I said, "Have they identified the body? Are they sure it was John? What happened?"

He started to speak, then wept again. After a moment, he said, "They're pretty sure it's John they found. They'll know for sure tomorrow. Oh, God, it's real, this time! This time it's really real!"

"So you weren't here when it happened?"

He snuffled some more and then said, "I went in to work to finish up some things I didn't get to this morning when I was-you know-out for a while. It was around six-thirty when I went in. John had gotten a call earlier, the one he told you about, saying this time he was going to burn. And at first it freaked us both out, but then he said, shit, he'd gotten lots of threats and none of them ever amounted to anything, so let's forget it. So we did.

"When I got back from the shop a little after eight, I came in and John wasn't here and a chair in the dining room was knocked over and the table was pushed back with the rug all bunched up. It looked like there had been a struggle or fight and John had been kidnaped. I was really scared all of a sudden, and I called you and you weren't home, and then I called the police. They sent a cruiser out, but as soon as the cop got here he got a call on his radio about the fire and he just took off."

"You'd gone into Albany in your car?"

"In John's. It's the one we use. I don't have a car. It's the Subaru back in the garage."

"Where was the fire?"

"Down behind Pocketbook Factory Number Three," he said, and took out a bandanna and wiped his mouth and nose. "There are some abandoned houses down there that belonged to the pocketbook company. Whoever started the fire used a lot of gasoline or something and the place went up like a fireball, Bub Bailey said."

"And John's body was badly burned?"

Sandifer shook and started to lose it again. "They could tell it was John because his wallet was left on the curb out front with a note in it. And from his wounded foot and– they're going to check on other things, dental records and things like that. Ann told them which dentist." He blew his nose in the bandanna.

"What did this note say that was stuck in the wallet?"

"They showed it to me but they kept it and they kept the wallet. It was horrible. The note said-it was printed in big letters on a piece of typing paper-it said, 'This is what happens to assholes who invade people's privacy.' "

"That's plain enough. It tends to confirm the motive."

"Why else would anybody do it?" Sandifer said. "Who else would want to kill John?"

"Can you think of anyone?"

"No, it must have been one of the people he outed. Or more than one of them. They'd've had to drag John out of here. He had a gun and he wouldn't have gone without a struggle. Maybe there were two, or even three or four."

"Where is the gun now?"

"I haven't seen it. I'll have to look."

"Did the police question the neighbors?"

"Chief Bailey went around himself. He said nobody saw or heard any fight or anything violent."

I said, "What are these, pod people around here? Nobody comes or goes, or sees or hears anything."

"They're elderly," Sandifer said. "They stay in with their air conditioners and their televisions on."

"What did you tell Bailey about the threats John received? You can be sure he'll question everybody who ever threatened John to find out where they were tonight-and last night when John was shot in the foot, and this morning at the time of the fire. You might even get Bailey believing that the other so-called attempts were real. I guess I'm glad you told me the truth, but I'm not crazy about knowing your dirty little politically-far-too-correct secret and having to pretend to Bub Bailey that I don't."

Timmy, who had sat silently scowling through my en tire exchange with Sandifer, suddenly piped up. "I'm not crazy about being in on it either."

This was why I hardly ever brought him along on business. Tonight had been a lapse. I said, "But now you are in on it, so let's just get on with the more important questions."

He looked away in disgust.

I said to Sandifer, "What names did you give Bailey?"

"Just the ones on the list John made up of people who threatened him-Slinger and Linkletter and those. And I gave him a complete set of Cityscapes and Queerscreeds with John's outing columns. I didn't mention any of the anonymous calls though, or all the people in the files. Do you think I should have brought them up?"

"No. I'll deal with those."

This got Timmy's attention again. "What do you mean?"

"I'll use the files. There's no reason for the police to have to go into them if I'm covering that end of the investigation." He gave me a look. "The files are obviously the key to finding John's killer or killers. And since it's important that they not fall into the hands of a government agency that might misuse them-as police agencies almost inevitably will-then I'll just have to take possession of the files and use them to find the killer and turn him-or them-over to the police with enough evidence to convict."

"Will you do that?" Sandifer said, looking a little brighter. "God, that would be great."

"Don-" Timmy said, and then realizing he could not say what he wanted to say in front of Sandifer, he waved it away.

"I don't have any choice," I said, "as far as I can see. It's either turn the files over to the cops, which is out of the question, or use them as an investigative tool at least as effectively as the police would. What else can I do?"

"Maybe you should just turn them over," Timmy said uneasily. "It's the Handbag police who'd be looking at them, not the much more dangerous Albany cops. Anyway, anybody who's in those files must have done so many disgusting things that the police already have them on their lists of the region's most outrageous perverts."

"I can't believe you said that."

"Well, you know what I mean."

Sandifer said, "They do tend to be the biggest whores. Most of those people didn't get into the files without being real scuzzballs."

"Scuzzballs deserve their privacy too," I said, "the Burger Court's loony Five Stooges 1986 opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Anyway, I happen to have read through those files this morning, and I can tell you that most of the people in there are simply gay men and women who live Ozzie-and-Harriet lives with their significant others, more or less, and a few of whom have strayed once in a while and their indiscretions happen to have been picked up and noted by some of John Rutka's informants. Should that information become official police information?"

"No," Timmy said, "of course not." He had on a distant thoughtful look, as if this were an interesting theoretical question concerning the abstract gay masses.

"John would be grateful," Sandifer said, and began to grow teary again. "He's always sort of expected to be disappointed in the people he's counted on. It was years before he even trusted me totally. It would have mattered a lot that you stuck by him, Strachey."

Timmy sat there with a quizzical look, as if unsure how I had managed to end up taking on work that would help serve as a memorial to a man Timmy had considered rotten to the core and whom I hadn't been too crazy about either. Whatever my degree of responsibility or lack of it in John Rutka's death-I didn't have the will or the energy to think about that quite yet-I was still obliged to stay on the case for one very good reason: as soon as I found the killer I could burn the loathsome files.

I said, "We'd better haul the files out of here and over to Crow Street, where I can lock them up." Timmy winced. "Eddie, maybe you'd better come too. You're probably in no danger, but you'll be able to feel secure in our spare room, and anyway I might need you to answer some questions about the files."

"Yeah, okay. I don't want to stay here alone tonight. I don't want to sleep alone in that room."

In the teenaged girl's bedroom on the second floor, Sandifer reached into the hippo's belly for the attic keys. He groped around, then shook the animal, vigorously, and then frantically.

"The keys aren't here."

We tore out to the attic door, which hung open. The keys dangled in the upper of the two locks. The light was on in the airless attic but the fan was off, as if someone had been there briefly and then left in a hurry. The desk and file cabinet appeared undisturbed, except that the top file drawer had been pulled out. It did not have a ransacked look, however. I said, "I suppose there's no way to tell if a file has been removed, or is there?"

"The index," Sandifer said, and opened the top drawer of the desk. He removed a bundle of papers clipped together and said,

"We'll have to go through both drawers and check the files against the list. Do you think whoever took John made him open the files first and took his own out?"

"His or theirs. That's what it looks like."

"Jesus. Then all we have to do to find out who did it is to see whose file is missing."

"Maybe. Though a killer who's playing with a full deck would have thought of the possibility of an index to the files and would have taken them all. Or he'd have taken someone else's file to aim the investigation in the wrong direction."

"Maybe he's not that smart," Sandifer said, and I hoped he was right. Although it was soon apparent that whether the pilferer of the files was brilliant or stupid hardly mattered at all. end user

12

There's no name on this entry," Timmy said. "It just says 'A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite.' "

"Who's that?" I asked Sandifer. "What does he mean by 'A for-whatever-it-is Mega-Hypocrite?"

" 'A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite,'" Timmy said again.

Sandifer looked baffled. "I don't know. I have no idea."

"All the other names in the index are spelled out," Timmy said. "Mega-Hypocrite is the only one that's coded like that."

We were back in Albany and had the file cabinet in the spare room in the second-floor rear of our house on Crow Street. The top drawer was open and I was checking the actual files against the index Timmy was reading from. The first name on the "A" page had been "Anderson, Cliff," and the file had been in the front of the drawer where it should have been. But when I looked for the second folder, for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite, it was not in the drawer.

"All-American Mega-Hypocrite is missing. Or maybe it's misfiled."

"I would doubt it," Sandifer said. "There were some things John could be careless about, but not recordkeeping. He was meticulous."

I searched through the files, in case Mega-Hypocrite had slid down or been uncharacteristically misplaced somehow.

"How would anybody stealing the file know that All-American Mega-Hypocrite was his designation?" Timmy said. "Eddie doesn't even know what it meant."

"Dunno. He might have forced Rutka to tell him which one was his file. We can assume he didn't know about the index in the desk drawer or he would have taken it. Or, he might have checked the files for a folder under his own name and, when he didn't find one, started a random search. He'd have come to the All-American Mega-Hypocrite file right away, maybe seen that the shoe fit, and verified it by going through the actual contents of the file."

I kept flipping through the folders, eyes peeled for Mega-Hypocrite. I asked Sandifer if there were any of the outees or soon-to-be-outees Rutka considered to be especially repugnantly hypocritical. "Bruno Slinger maybe?"

"He considered them all sickeningly hypocritical," Sandifer said. "The worst one was always the one he was going after during whatever week it was."

Rutka's column in the next planned Queerscreed, galleys of which we had carried off from his desktop, outed an independently wealthy ACLU booster, not much of a candidate for Mega-Hypocrite.

Timmy said, "If they weren't for the cause, they were against it, eh?" He was gripping the index sheaf tightly, and I was glad it wasn't a club.

"Sort of," Sandifer said. "I guess you could put it that way."

"Righteous John Rutka and the unrighteous multitudes."

"Timothy," I said, reminding him with a look that it was all moot now.

"Actually," Sandifer said, "there was this one person, I know, who John had been working on for a long time trying to get the goods on. He knew the guy was gay but he didn't have the proof, or enough proof. He never told me who it was because he said I'd never believe it."

"Why wouldn't you have believed it? Didn't you trust John?"

Sandifer flushed and gave a quick embarrassed shrug. "John was sometimes loose with some of his facts."

"Even with you?"

"He just couldn't help it. I realized this about him not long after we met. But it was just the way he was and I got used to it. He mostly just made things up about himself, not other people. I don't think he was ever dishonest in his work. He would never say it, but I think he knew he'd been able to maintain his professional integrity and he was proud of that. And he was always careful in his outing columns to get his facts right."

"What else did he tell you about this special case? Could this be our Mr. A-for-All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite?"

"I can't remember. I don't think he said anything else about the guy. The only reason I remember at all," Sandifer said, "is because John got a kind of funny, intense look when he mentioned it. I can remember the day. We were in the car driving up the street in Handbag and he told me about this guy he said he was really going to fix, and he had this look on his face I'd never seen before. I can still see him."

"Describe the look."

"Just weird, intense. And I think he might have been blushing a little. Or maybe just angry. I don't know what it was."

"Mega-Hypocrite is nowhere in the top drawer," I said. I started through the bottom drawer.

Timmy had been flipping idly through the index sheets, perusing the names, and clucking in mild disgust.

"What!"

He'd been perched on the edge of the guest room bed and suddenly he rose straight up like a Looney Tunes character. He went into a swivet, hit the ceiling, went through the roof. "Did you see this?"

"What's that?"

"I'm in here! My name is in the index!"

"Now do you agree it's better that I deal with the files and they don't fall into the hands of the police?"

"Let me see the file. Look in the C’s."

"I didn't know," Sandifer said. "Jeez, I'm really sorry."

I handed Timmy the folder with his name on it and said, "This is a pretty slender dossier for a pervert as outrageous as yourself."

He read it. "This is disgusting. It's from a hotel employee who says– Oh, crime-en-ee."

I kept on flipping through the bottom drawer searching for Mega-Hypocrite.

"Have you seen this?" he said, moaning.

"I have."

"That liar."

"It's always risky placing your trust in economists."

"He told me he'd never done it before with a North American."

"And did the earth move?"

"I guess you two have a pretty open relationship," Sandifer said. "John and I did for a while, but everything started to come apart, so we went back to monogamy."

"Our rules are variable," I said. "Well, no, that's not quite it."

Timmy snapped, "He means it's not the rules that are variable, it's the observance of them. Recently, only by me. I made a mistake once in fourteen years. And look at this putrid bilge! I would not feel any more violated and demeaned if I discovered this garbage in the files of the F.B.I. In fact, this is worse. I can't believe that gay people are doing this to other gay people. This is not a blow against the old-fashioned fear and self-loathing that made gay people miserable through the supposedly recently ended dark ages-it's just a kind of bizarre extension of it."

Sandifer was sitting in a chair with his head in his hands and saying nothing. Timmy looked over at him and said, "I guess I've made my point. I'll shut up. You don't need to be listening to this now."

"It's okay," Sandifer said dolefully. "It doesn't matter what anybody says anymore."

I said, "There's no Mega-Hypocrite file in here. Assuming that such a file actually existed, somebody seems to have taken pains to excise it."

Timmy shoved the "T. Callahan" file back my way as if it were soiling his hands and said, "Why wouldn't it have existed?"

"Rutka could have planned a file by that name, then changed his mind and used the hypocrite's real name instead. A name on one of the other files might be the real Mega-Hypocrite."

"So maybe one of the other files is missing. We haven't checked that."

"Let's do it."

It took two and a half minutes for Timmy to read off each of the 311 names in the index. A file was located for each name. The files were flawlessly arranged in alphabetical order. Still, the only file missing was the one called "A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite."

Sandifer suddenly looked alert. He said, "Maybe the books would help."

We looked at him. "Books?"

"John kept financial records for the whole outing campaign in Cityscape and Queerscreed. Sometimes he paid people for information. That's not the ideal way to go about it, I know, but John always believed that ethically these things evened themselves out over the long run."

"Where are these financial records?"

"In my bag. I brought them. I didn't think I should leave them alone in the house."

"Where's the bag?"

"In the hall." He went out and came back immediately carrying a big beat-up red shoulder bag stuffed with belongings. He unzipped it, reached in and groped around, and came up with a bookkeeper's bound entry book.

"How is this going to help?" Timmy said.

"Maybe it won't. But if Rutka had informants who dished up dirt that was so critical to the cause that Rutka was willing to lay out cash for it, maybe one of those people can figure out-or will know-who the Mega-Hypocrite is."

I scanned the ledger. Rutka seemed to have had just one source of income, the family hardware store. "HDW" brought in from three thousand to four thousand dollars each month. I asked Sandifer if Rutka had owned half the store.

"Forty-nine percent. Ann owns fifty-one. That's the way it was left to them by their father."

"John didn't resent the difference?"

"He was interested in the income, not the control. Ann runs the store for a good salary and does a good job. And the two of them got along in their way. They were different but they never got in each other's way. John lived his life and Ann lived hers."

The disbursements included household expenses– utilities, taxes, locksmith-along with occasional "personal" disbursements, and larger ones for "office and printing." Most of the payments in the latter category were made to Kopy-King. There was no category called "informants" or "spies" or "dish."

There were, however, payments to three entries listed apparently by their initials: NZ, DR, and JG. I'd never seen NZ or DR before, but JG I had. I got out Ronnie Linkletter's file and there it was: the handwritten sheet Rutka had left that said "From JG Linkletter at motel with A." Then two long rows of dates. I checked the calendar and saw that they were all Wednesdays, starting the previous July and running into mid-June.

I asked Sandifer if he knew what these initials meant. He puzzled over them and finally said no. The "A" might have meant Asshole Mega-Hypocrite, but the other initials, if that's what they were, remained indecipherable.

I read aloud the payments to NZ: $320 in December; $435 in January; $310 in February; similar amounts through July. JG received even higher amounts from October through July, totaling nearly $6,000. DR was the big money-maker. He-or she, or it

– was paid an even $ 1,400 per month from the previous September right up through July. According to a notation in the margin, all these payments had been made "in cash."

I asked Sandifer, "Were you ever with John when he met his regular informants? It looks as if that's what these entries refer to.

He could have received information from them over the phone, but he must have met them once a month to hand over the cash payments for their diligent research. People in their right minds don't send cash amounts larger than a dime through the mail these days."

"No, I never did. John would just say he had to go talk to somebody. Or he had a meeting with somebody. He wanted to keep me out of that part of it. To protect me, was what he said."

"Protect you from what? You were out in the streets hustling Queerscreed. Wasn't that where the greatest physical risk was?"

"I guess so. I'm not sure what he meant by that– protecting me. I guess he thought some of the people he was after and some of the people they were mixed up with were dangerous. And he was right," Sandifer added with eyes glistening. "John knew somehow that some of them were very dangerous people."

I could no longer argue with that. end user