Текст книги "Strachey's Folly "

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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Maynard had left his keys on the dining room table before the shooting, and I had picked them up to lock up the house when I left for the hospital. Now I unlocked the wooden front door and stepped into the foyer, with Timmy close behind. Lights were on in the living room and dining room, as they had been when I left, but the rooms were otherwise not the same at all.

Drawers had been opened and their contents dumped on the African and Central American rugs. Books had been flung from shelves. Paintings and other artwork were largely undamaged, but many were hanging cockeyed, as if whoever had tossed the place had conducted a search so methodical that even the wall art had been carefully examined for—something.

Timmy said, "I've never seen this done before. It's nauseating."

I had seen it before and found it just as sickening this time as the last time and the time before that. I said, "Don't touch anything yet," and walked through the dining room and toward the kitchen in the rear of the house.

"Are you going to call the police?" Timmy said. "I don't know about that."

"I don't either. Although if we don't call the cops and it does turn out that some of them are involved in this, they may be inclined to think we know more than we actually know. It might be better for us—and for Maynard and maybe Jim Suter– if we look like a couple of uninvolved outsiders who are shocked and frightened by all of this, but ignorant of—whatever it is that's going on."

"Of course, that's exactly what we are."

"You don't have to remind me."

The kitchen was bedlam. Every pot, pan, and plastic refrigerator box had been left out on the counter or on the floor. The cupboards had been emptied of food and dishes. Food was piled in the sink—spices, Wheat Chex, fruit, peanut butter, peanut oil, sorbet, half a thawing frozen chicken.

"There's where they came in," I said, and we looked over at the sizable section of the back door around the lock that had essentially been dismantled.

"I'm surprised," I said, "that nobody heard this happen and reported it."

"Maybe somebody did report it. And the police never came."

"Oh, sure. The 911 operator, the dispatchers—they're all in on this . . . thing. This conspiracy so vast it's got tentacles reaching into every level of law enforcement in the District of Columbia. Timothy, I'm not ready to go quite that far."

"How far are you ready to go?"

I tugged the broken door open and flipped on the switch for the backyard floodlight. The patio and fish tank seemed undisturbed. The back gate in the tall board fence was shut and locked. The intruder, or intruders, had apparently clambered over the fence both coming and going.

We made our way back to the dining room and up the half-open stairwell to the second floor. The mess upstairs was like the mess downstairs. Nothing seemed to have been purposely smashed; the chaos appeared to be the result of a methodical search that had been unsuccessful over a long time and across a lot of square footage.

I said to Timmy, "This job must have taken a couple of hours. I left for the hospital at about ten-forty. It's two thirty-five now. If the intruder was watching the house and waiting for us to leave, he could have jumped the fence early. But that would have involved a heavy risk of being overheard. If he'd waited for all the neighbors to go to sleep, after midnight, say—and on a Saturday night that would have been unpredictable—then he'd have run the risk of our coming back and catching him in the act."

"Unless, of course," Timmy said, "he or they were in touch with someone who could keep him or them informed about our location and movements. Then there'd be no risk at all of discovery."

"Uh-huh."

The middle bedroom, where Timmy and I were staying, had been ransacked just like Maynard's front bedroom. Our bags were open and our clothes strewn about.

"Jeez, I ironed that shirt myself," Timmy said. "Now look at it."

"You've had a rough night, Timothy. I just hope nobody went in the bathroom and sucked on your toothbrush."

"Look, you know what I mean."

I did. We went into Maynard's office in the small back room. File drawers had been yanked open and papers were everywhere. The disk boxes next to his computer were open and empty. Maynard's computer files were evidently gone. The telephone answering machine on the desk was not blinking. I checked for the tape; it had been taken, too.

Timmy said, "It's a good thing you picked up Maynard's address book before you came to the hospital. I'll bet they'd have taken it."

"Maybe."

Timmy suddenly looked up from the debris around Maynard's Mac and said, "The letter from Jim Suter! Do you think they took that? Where was it when we left the house?"

"It was right where it is now. In my pocket with the address book. I grabbed it just before the cab arrived."

"Good for you. Any particular reason you picked up the letter? Surely you didn't suppose for a second that Maynard's getting shot and that strange, turbulent letter with all the talk in it of murder and people on the Hill and death threats and the D.C. police—you didn't think all that suggested some kind of terrible conspiracy, did you?"

"No, I just did what I thought Maynard would have wanted me to do: keep that letter safe."

"Well, that's a good reason, too."

While Timmy changed out of his bloodstained clothes and went about straightening up the mess in the guest room, I walked down to the bathroom. The medicine cabinet had been opened and most of its contents dumped in the sink. The magazines stacked on the shelf next to the toilet– The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Smithsonian, Blueboy—looked as if they had been rifled; several lay open on the tile floor. I flipped through the Blueboy, then resumed examining the scene. The toilet paper had not been unrolled, a sign, perhaps, that the intruder whose job it had been to search the bathroom was essentially anal retentive, despite the nature of his assigned duties that night.

Downstairs, the doorbell rang. I stepped into the hallway. Timmy appeared in the guest room doorway and stood very still. There was an alertness in him that I knew was partly caffeine and partly fear. He said in a low voice, "Should we answer it?"

"I guess we should see who it is."

I started down the stairs as the bell rang again, and Timmy followed me.

In the living room, I pulled the curtains aside and looked out the bay window at the front stoop. A man stood there, but it was his car, double-parked alongside Maynard's Chevy, that drew my attention. It was a D.C. police patrol car, its flashers flashing.

"It's a cop," I told Timmy.

I went around and unlocked the door, opened it, and stood face-to-face with Ray Craig.

Craig said evenly, "Somebody in the neighborhood reported a disturbance in this house earlier. The officers who responded to the call were called to a robbery over on Half Street before they could investigate. I recognized the address on the report and thought I better come over and see what the problem was." He peered over my shoulder at Timmy, standing perfectly still, and at the wrecked interior of Maynard's house. His nicotine stench wafted into the room, and Craig said, "Looks like you had a break-in. Anything missing that you know of? It's been a real pisser of a night for you and your buddy Sudbury."

"It has," I said.

"We were just about to call the police," Timmy said.

Craig stared at him hard, his face still devoid of expression, but with something in the set of his head on his narrow shoulders that suggested suspicion mixed with contempt.

Chapter 5

Our wake-up call at the Capitol Hill Hotel, three blocks from Maynard's house, came at eight. I immediately got an outside line and phoned GW to check on Maynard's condition. An ICU nurse said he was "stable."

Death is the stablest condition of all, but I knew she didn't mean that.

"He's alive," I told Timmy.

"Thank God."

Ray Craig had left us at 3:15 a.m. He had noted the damage and remarked on how no valuables appeared to have been taken. He said the break-in did not seem to have been a burglary, and again he asked if we knew of any enemies Maynard had, in Washington or in Mexico. He inquired about Maynard's Mexican "associations" half a dozen times. Again, we told Craig we didn't know of any enemies Maynard had in Mexico, which was true.

Craig also asked, "Did Sudbury bring men back here for sex?" This came just as Craig was about to leave. It was a reasonable question for an investigator to ask following an assault on an urban gay man in the nineties. But the faint trace of a leer on Craig's ordinarily blank face lent the question a quality that was both lubricious and gratuitous. Also, it seemed to come as an afterthought, a bow to investigatory convention.

Timmy had told Craig, "Maynard is a sexually alive adult male who dates from time to time. It wouldn't surprise me if some of his dates have spent the night with him. But Maynard is old-fashioned in some respects, and I think cautious. He wouldn't have invited anybody into his house whom he didn't know reasonably well."

Craig sniffed and said, "Yeah, sure."

I told him, "We were lucky you had a chance to stop over here tonight, Lieutenant. This must have taken you away from more important cases."

"This is important," he replied, but added nothing more. He told us it would be a good idea if we did not spend the rest of the night in Maynard's house. He said he'd ask a patrol car to check the front and rear of the house periodically. Craig recommended a hotel several blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue, just east of the Capitol, and he offered us a ride. We declined the ride. We waited ten minutes after Craig had left, then hiked the three blocks up to the Capitol Hill Hotel on Second Street, SE. It was not the hotel Craig had recommended, just one we'd seen, while walking in the neighborhood, that looked quiet, comfortable, and, as Timmy had put it, "unthreatening."

In the morning, we'd slept but we did not sparkle. After I called GW, Timmy checked off the names of people in Maynard's address book who were friends Maynard had mentioned to Timmy, and while he showered, I made calls. It was an hour earlier in Southern Illinois on a Sunday morning, so I figured I'd phone Maynard's family last and let them know that he had been shot and badly wounded.

No actual human beings answered my first three calls, but I left messages explaining who and where I was and informed Maynard's friends of his misfortune. On the fourth and fifth calls, I reached a man and a woman respectively, and they turned out to be writers, too. The man was another freelancer, the woman, Dana Mosel, a reporter at the Post. I nearly asked Mosel how I could locate a D.C. police official of undisputed high integrity, someone I could confide in on a matter that law-enforcement higher-ups might refer to as "sensitive." But I decided that a more roundabout route to a clean cop was called for, so I let it go.

Both of Maynard's writer friends were shaken by the news of the shooting—which had taken place too late to make the Sunday papers—and his friends said they would notify others and would visit Maynard at GW as soon as his condition allowed. Both asked, "Was it a robbery?" I said that that was still unclear.

I was about to make another call when Timmy came out of the bathroom. "I'd better talk to his parents," he said. "I've never met them, but Maynard might have mentioned me. You know the way Peace Corps people tell stories back home."

I said I knew. The eleven-year-old son of another of Timmy's old Peace Corps friends liked to refer to the tales of India that his father told as "Dad's twelve stories."

"Do you think Maynard is really safe even in the hospital?" Timmy said. Ray Craig had assured us that the hospital's security staff would keep constant watch over Maynard, and at GW he was in no danger of being attacked again by his E Street assailant.

I said, "Why? Are you afraid that whoever shot Maynard is going to sneak into the hospital, dress up in a surgical gown swiped from a closet, walk into Maynard's room carrying a clipboard, and stick a hypodermic needle in his ear? Timothy, I'm surprised your feverish imagination can't come up with something cleverer than that old TV Pi-show cliche."

"As a matter of fact, my feverish imagination has. Jim Suter's letter talked about people who sounded as if they were powerful enough to place somebody inside the hospital."

"You mean to say 'deep' inside the hospital, don't you? That's the way it's usually phrased in the mall-movie trailers and doctor-show promos."

Timmy tugged his pants up around his slender waist and said sourly, "I really don't know what's going on with you, Donald. But you seem to be in total denial of the meaning of the events of the past eighteen hours. First, we discover a black, funereal AIDS quilt panel for Jim Suter, a man who apparently isn't dead. The panel has pages from Betty Krumfutz's campaign biography on it. Then Betty herself shows up, examines the panel, and flees in horror. A few hours later, the panel is vandalized and the pages stolen. Meanwhile, Maynard receives a letter from Jim Suter saying Suter's life is in danger because he knows something—or somebody thinks he knows something– that can put important people in prison."

I said, "The letter actually said 'muchos anos'—'big enchiladas' being jailed for 'muchos anos.' Maybe that means these people are Mexican."

"Possibly, yes. And then," Timmy went on, yanking a shirt over his head, "somebody shoots Maynard—shoots him! With a gun! Poor Maynard—Maynard, one of the sweetest, most decent ..." His voice caught, and he shook his head in despair.

I reached out, took Timmy's hand, and pulled him onto the bed next to me. "And then," he continued in a tremulous voice, "this cop shows up who's some cold-blooded, suspicious, creep-show weirdo, asking all the wrong questions. And then Maynard's house is ransacked in an obvious search for something somebody desperately wants to get hold of—something incriminating, presumably. And then, and then, and then—you say I'm being paranoid?"

I kissed him lightly on his big, white, beautifully shaped ear and spoke into it. "Yes and no."

"Oh, I see. Yes, I'm being paranoid, and no, I'm not. Oh." He flopped back on the bed. I lay down beside him and lit a mental cigarette. I said, "Look, I understand that a lot of these awful things that are going on must be interconnected. Betty Krumfutz and the quilt vandalism, the shooting and the search of the house, and probably the quilt panel and Jim Suter's letter– yes, some or all of those form part of something bigger and even worse than the sum of all those ugly parts. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't have observed Jim Suter's wishes—and Maynard's– and feigned ignorance with that strange, obnoxious cop.

"I'm only suggesting, Timothy, that even actual conspiracies have limits that are nearly always narrow. Whole hospitals, whole police departments, whole taxi fleets, are not parts of plots, except in Orwell, or Kafka's imagination, or—what? Oliver Stone? Nixon's tapes? A Pat Robertson fund-raising letter?" Timmy smiled weakly. Then quickly he grew somber again and said, "You're right, but . . . how are we supposed to know which cop, or which taxi driver, or which hospital employee is the one not to trust? That's the problem I'm having right now." Skeptical as I was of conspiracy theories to explain evil in human affairs, it was plain enough that Timmy's fears were not groundless, just, it seemed to me, highly exaggerated. Even more important, his fear was interfering with his analytical powers and clouding his judgment—often far keener than mine—in a way I knew was not going to help. I believed that taking the first train home to Albany would have been the smartest thing for him to do until he regained his perspective. But I knew he wasn't about to do that: he wouldn't leave Maynard; lie wouldn't leave me.

I said, "What we have to do, I think, Timothy, is find somebody in authority who we can trust absolutely—someone who is known and trusted by someone in Washington we know and trust—and then confide in that person and ask him or her to help. What we need first and foremost is an honest cop. Preferably a top-echelon honest cop."

"That makes sense," Timmy said. "But how would we ever be sure that the honest cop was an actual honest cop and not someone whose sole purpose in the police department wasn't to pose as an honest cop and gain the confidence of people like us and then—do something. Get rid of us or whatever."

"Boy, you are freaked out."

"I guess I am."

"Do you want to go home?"

"Of course not. I mean, I'd love to, but it's out of the question."

"I figured that. Would you like any help in getting through this? I mean beyond what I have to offer—kind words, back rubs, active and/or passive anal intercourse three point two times a week, et cetera?"

"No, what you have to offer sounds sufficient, Don. Why? What else did you have in mind?"

"I don't know. Pharmacological assistance perhaps, of a legal or illegal variety?"

"Nah."

"A priest?"

"No, as you just pointed out, I've got you for anal intercourse."

"How about a Jungian analyst? A little dream work might be just what the doctor ordered for a boy overcome with the heebie-jeebies. Or an orthodox Freudian perhaps. I've heard Washington is overrun with them. 'So zen, tell me, Mr. Callahan, vaht cumps to mind?'"

He rolled toward me and said, "I guess we do have to just find somebody to trust with all this crap. You're right. That's a good first step. Maybe I'm feeling the way I'm feeling because we're so isolated with our dangerous knowledge, so alone with it. And we don't need a spiritual adviser, we need a good, old-fashioned clean cop. If possible, more than one. Then there'll be at least three of us to get to the bottom of this, and that'll make it easier."

"Timmy, I don't think 'we' have to get to the bottom of anything. All 'we' have to do is find an authority we can trust and tell him or her what we know, and then make sure Maynard is safe and recovering well. I guess we could straighten up his house, too—pick the Indonesian wombat knuckles out of the kitchen sink and so forth. But we can leave it to others better equipped than we are to get to the bottom of things."

This elicited a spontaneous snort, as I suspected it might. "Don't kid me," he said gaily. "You wouldn't miss sticking your nose in this reeking swamp of intrigue for anything in the world." I shrugged. "I know it's only a matter of time," Timmy went on happily, "before you're off to Mexico, and maybe even darkest Central Pennsylvania. I might not be able to tag along—I've got lo be back to work on Tuesday. But I certainly wouldn't attempt lo restrain you. I know you're in this awful thing to the finish, and I just want you to know, Don, that I'll help out in any way I can, personally and financially, and all I ask is that you get used

to the fact that I am scared to death and even acknowledge from time to time that I actually have reason to be."

He seemed more relaxed now, and I was a lot less apprehensive about his mental health than I had been a few minutes earlier.

Then someone knocked at the door.

We both started, and Timmy, big-eyed, whispered, "Who knows we're here?"

"Five friends of Maynard's I just phoned," I whispered back. "The two I talked to and the three I left messages with."

The knock came again, three quick, hard raps.

I got up, went over, and looked through the peephole. I said to Timmy, "Take a deep breath and let it out slowly."

I opened the door and there stood Ray Craig glowering in at us like some grade-B film noir house dick. "It wasn't easy tracking you two down. I had to check half the hotels on the Hill." He must have been upwind of us, for his nicotine stench again rolled into the room.

I gestured for Craig to come on in, and as my glance fell on Timmy, I could actually see his pulse beating in his neck.

Chapter 6

Using the pretext of having to hurry back to the hospital and check on Maynard, we were able to extricate ourselves from Craig within twenty minutes. He told us he wanted to hear our narratives of the shooting a second time. He said sometimes details floated back into memory during the retelling of a traumatic event a day later. This was true, but with Craig the line sounded phony. Again, he sat jiggling his loafer and looking both suspicious of and mildly disgusted with everything we had to say. Then, with barely a word uttered, Craig got up and left. This time, he had asked about Mexico only twice instead of six times.

"What is it with that creep?" Timmy muttered after Craig shut the door behind him.

"I don't know," I said, "but I think it's time we talked to somebody we can trust who'll at least be in a position to offer an informed opinion on Craig—and maybe everything else that's happened. Don't you know somebody in Frankie Balducci's office?" Frankie Balducci was the openly gay congressman from Boston who'd been a relentless voice of sanity on gay matters in an institution where understanding of, and attitudes toward, homosexuality had not yet, as the twenty-first century approached, advanced far into the eighteenth.

Timmy said, "Bob Bittner. He was in my class at Georgetown."

"Can you call him? Don't tell him why, but just ask him if he can find a D.C. police officer who's cleaner than Mother Teresa."

"That treacherous, headline-grabbing, reactionary old crone?"

"All right, then. Cleaner than . . . than any other cop in D.C. Gay might help, too, closeted or not."

Timmy reached his old friend, who agreed to try to track down an indisputably clean cop, no questions asked, and he said he'd get back to Timmy in fifteen minutes. I showered and Timmy went downstairs for a newspaper, and then Bittner called back. The officer we should talk to, he said, was Detective Lieutenant Chondelle Dolan.

After he hung up, Timmy said, "Bob says she's gay, she's smart, and she's squeaky-clean. Dolan is disinclined to rock any department boats, and she goes along and gets along with the mayor and his crowd of leeches and scam artists. But Bob says a woman he knows, Rain Terry, was once involved with Dolan for several months, and Terry swears Dolan is both one of the most uncorruptible people she's ever met and one of the most discreet."

"That's our cop."

"Bob wasn't sure she'd talk to us. Dolan is one for going through channels, he said."

"But if she's that clean, I'll bet our story will pique her interest, at least."

While I dialed Dolan's number, Timmy walked over and yanked open the door to the corridor. Assured that no one was lurking there, he shut the door and came back and sat on the bed while I waited for an answer at Dolan's home.

I was about to hang up when a low, groggy voice came on the line. "Yeah, hello."

"Lieutenant Dolan?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm Donald Strachey, a private investigator, and a friend of a friend of a friend of Rain Terry, who suggested I call you."

"Oh, Rain did, huh?" She sounded as if I had wakened her from a long, drugged sleep.

"I'm looking for the cleanest, most discreet police officer in Washington to talk to about, among other mystifying events, the shooting last night of a gay man by the name of Maynard Sudbury on E Street, Southeast. There may be more to the attack than the police have been told, and I need to bounce some of what I know off somebody in the department I know I can trust. Rain told Bob Bittner, of Frankie Balducci's office, that you are that person. Can we meet somewhere and I can run what I know by you?"

A silence. "Give me your number. I'll call you back."

I recited our hotel and room numbers and hung up. I said, "She's checking on Bittner with Terry and on us with Bittner."

I glanced through the Post—Bob Dole was threatening to take off the kid gloves in his second debate with Clinton—and Timmy checked the corridor again and then looked out the window for suspicious characters two stories below on Second Street, SE.

Within minutes Chondelle Dolan had called back and agreed to meet Timmy and me at a Pennsylvania Avenue bagel shop in half an hour. Meanwhile, I checked GW again to verify that Maynard was still stable. He was. With Timmy's concurrence, I went ahead and phoned a number in Tilton, Illinois, and reached, as I hoped I would, old Peace Corps ties aside, May-nard's brother. Neither Timmy nor I wanted to be the one to notify Maynard's parents, if we could avoid it. Edwin Sudbury said he would do that, and he said he and his wife would leave for Washington as soon as they could make travel arrangements.

"Was it a mugging?" Sudbury asked anxiously.

I said the motive for the attack had not yet been determined, but that given Washington's robbery rate, a mugging was what a lot of people seemed to suspect it might have been. Seated nearby, Timmy rolled his eyes.

"You got ID?" she said.

"Sure." I showed her my New York State PI license, and Timmy presented his card identifying him as the chief legislative aide to New York State assemblyman Myron Lipshutz.

"Bob Bittner says you guys have your idiosyncrasies but I hat you're responsible enough citizens, and I should take you seriously even if what you have to say might sound a little gonzo at first."

"That sums us up," I said.

Dolan looked at me with no hint of enthusiasm but with large dark eyes that were interested and alert. In her midthirties, she had a big, handsome Ibo face with the kind of sharply ridged, ample lips that I'd always found deeply erotic on black men and pleasing in a less hormonal way on black women. Dolan's shoulder-length hair, done in a near-flip, was black and gleaming, and her eye shadow was the same shade of cobalt blue as her two-piece silk suit and blouse. Had it not been for her bulky muscularity, she'd have looked less like a cop than a prosecuting attorney, or a regional administrator of the Department of Labor. She was both cool and formidable—I guessed that even in Marion Barry's age of racial payback in Washington, her rise through the police ranks had not been easy—and it looked as if we had lucked out in hooking up with Chondelle

Dolan.

Timmy fidgeted with his bagel and said, "Do you mind if we look at your ID, too, Ms. Dolan?"

"No problem," she said, and flipped open a black leather wallet so that we could examine her name and badge.

"Thanks," Timmy said. "We're nervous—I am, anyway– and -when you hear about all this grotesque stuff, I think you'll understand why."

"Uh-huh. Well, you go ahead and tell me your story. I've got plenty of time. I've got a lunch date at one, but till then I'm interested to hear what you got to say about this shooting you mentioned."

I began to speak, but Timmy's eyes darted quickly around the bagel shop at the other customers, and he cut me off with, "You used to date Rain Terry? I just met her a few times and she seemed awfully nice."

"Yeah, Rain's a peach." Dolan picked up on Timmy's antsi-ness and leaned closer and lowered her voice. "Rain's got two kids now with her partner—two little boys. Did you know that?"

"No, I didn't," Timmy said.

"That's not for me," Dolan said in a matter-of-fact way. "I got nine brothers and sisters, seven of them younger than me. Somebody else wants to overpopulate the world, fine. Me? Uh-uh."

"I'm the father of a child in Edensburg, New York, north of Albany," Timmy said, and with an accustomed gesture whipped out his wallet. "Two lesbian friends asked me to be the father of their child—via artificial insemination, of course—and it turns out I love it. This is Erica Osborne-Kotlowitz."

Dolan glanced briefly at the photo of a tiny person in a white dress and said, "Looks human to me, Timothy. Good for you, honey."

"She'll be seventeen months old this Thursday," he said.

"Uh-huh."

I said, "Chondelle—may I call you Chondelle?"

"Yes, you may."

"Chondelle, to get to the point, a close friend of Timmy's was shot and seriously wounded in front of his house on E Street, Southeast, last night."

"Maynard Sudbury is his name," Timmy put in, leaning close to Dolan. "We were in the Peace Corps together in India in the midsixties. A poultry development project. Few of us had any real experience with farming of any kind. We were what the Peace Corps calls BAGs—B.A. generalists. The Peace Corps philosophy at that time was—"

"Timmy, Chondelle has a date in a couple of hours, so maybe we need to just explain to her what happened yesterday and last night and postpone the theories of rural development until a later date."

"Yeah," she said, "I'd love to hear about you and your friends raising chickens. But let's save that."

I looked around, and nobody was seated at the tables adjacent to ours, and none of the Sunday-morning coffee drinkers and Post readers in the shop showed any sign of being aware of us at all. I said, "Timmy is afraid that the shooting and a number of other disturbing events yesterday are interconnected—part of an extensive Robert Ludlum-style conspiracy. I don't agree, but his suspicions are not entirely off-the-wall. It was a pretty wild twelve hours yesterday." Then I laid it all out: the first un-expurgated version of Saturday's events spoken out loud by Timmy or me to anyone.

While Timmy shifted uneasily in his seat, I described to Dolan Maynard's shock at discovering an AIDS quilt panel for Jim Suter; the mysterious appearance at the panel by a woman Maynard recognized as former congresswoman Betty Krumfutz; the letter from Suter warning Maynard that Suter's life was in danger and the admonition not to reveal Suter's whereabouts to anyone, especially not to the D.C. cops or to any people on "the Hill"; the reported vandalism of the Suter panel on the quilt; the brutal shooting; the ransacking of Maynard's house while Timmy and I were at the hospital; the unnerving multiple appearances by D.C. police detective Ray Craig.

Dolan listened to this recitation carefully and with a look of concern and growing distaste. When I mentioned Suter's warning not to reveal any of this story to the D.C. cops, Dolan raised a carefully drawn eyebrow but did not react otherwise.