Текст книги "Strachey's Folly "

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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with.

Chondelle said, "It sounds like it won't hurt if you just go ahead and ask Mrs. Krumfutz who the boyfriend is and where they are. If she's not involved in whatever it is Suter is afraid of, there's no risk at all for him or you. If she is involved, you've already alerted her that you're interested in Suter and there's not much more damage you can do than you've already done. Of course, if she thinks you've got something on her, then you can bargain with her. Unless she just lets on that she's going along with your wishes and then has Jim Suter shot dead and, just to be on the safe side, she arranges to have you blown away, too."

Timmy flinched. I reached for my coffee cup.

Chondelle went on, "But it sounds more like her husband is the baddie here, if anybody in the family is. So both of you are probably okay for now. Anyway, look—how about if Sudbury's friend Hively, the writer for the Blade, calls up Mrs. Krumfutz? Hively can say he's doing a story on the mysterious Jim Suter quilt panel, and he heard Suter was in Mexico with his boyfriend Jorge, and does she know how to get in touch with Jorge? Why wouldn't that work?"

Timmy looked doubtful. "I don't think Hively would call Mrs. Krumfutz without some explanation from us as to what this is all about. He's a nosy reporter, after all. And if we tell him the truth, then he's involved in this—whatever it is—too. I don't want to do that to anybody else."

Chondelle sipped from the second of the two double espressos she'd ordered, then said, "So what if Hively didn't call her, but somebody saying he was Bud Hively of the Washington Blade did? That would work just as well, if you ask me." She set her cup down, winked at me, and gazed at Timmy, waiting.

Timmy said, "Uh-uh. Not me."

"Why not?" Chondelle asked.

"For one thing, I've always been a terrible liar."

"It wouldn't take but a minute. You could prevaricate for one little minute, I'll bet."

I said, "Timothy, it would just be a small social lie."

He reddened. "No, it wouldn't. It would be much more than that."

I said, "You see, Chondelle, he went to Georgetown. He was educated by Jesuits."

"Yeah," she said, "Clinton went there, too, I hear."

"Look, I'm not all that pompously self-righteous," Timmy said. "Jeez, give me a break. It's not that I've never told a lie. It's lhat I'm really bad at it. I'll blush and probably stutter."

"Mrs. Krumfutz will never see you blush over the phone," I said. "And to her, you'll sound as if you're just another homosexual with a speech impediment."

Timmy fumed for another minute, but finally agreed to impersonate newspaper reporter Bud Hively and phone Mrs. Krum-liitz. He said he guessed the morality of his doing so was sound overall, though muddy, and his biggest concern was his inepti-lude as a liar as a result of a paucity of experience. We kidded him some more about the lofty moral plane he lived on. It was one of the characteristics that had drawn me to Timmy nearly twenty years earlier, and which had made me want to remain with him through hard times and easy, except, of course, whenever his rigidity made me want to flee the sound of his voice.

Five minutes later, after Chondelle had obtained Betty Krum-futz's Log Heaven phone number through a police department source, we sent Timmy to a pay phone around the corner on Pennsylvania Avenue to lie through his teeth.

While Timmy was gone, Ray Craig made another pass and squinted over at us. He must have spotted Timmy at the pay phone and wondered what we were up to now. But Craig didn't stop. He just continued on down the block and hung a left at the corner.

Timmy was back in three minutes. He was wearing a half smile as he seated himself. He slurped up some cappuccino from his cup.

I said, "So?"

He grinned a little dementedly. Now he knew he'd go to hell, but apparently he didn't give a fig. "Jorge is Jorge Ramos. Ramos and Suter met in her office, yes, but Mrs. Krumfutz doesn't know Ramos very well. He's a friend of Alan McChesney, who used to be her chief of staff in the House. McChesney now runs the office of Congressman Burton Olds. McChesney often vacations in Ramos's house on the Caribbean coast, below Can-cun, and Mrs. Krumfutz said that if Jim Suter is with Ramos, that's probably where they are. She gave me the name of the village near Playa del Carmen." Timmy lifted his cup again and drank from it.

Chondelle said, "Nice work, Timothy. No offense intended, but it looks like you're a better fibber than you thought you were. It's nothing to be proud of, but it can come in handy, can't it?"

I said, "So you are adept as a liar. This changes everything. I may never believe another word you say."

"Neither of you two guys ever told a lie to the other one?" Chondelle asked.

Timmy said, "No."

I said, "Not for many years, so far as I am able to recall."

"It was amazingly easy getting the information out of Mrs. Krumfutz," Timmy said. "She asked me if our conversation would be off the record, and I said yes. She said she did not wish to be quoted in the Blade on anything having to do with the AIDS quilt, and she did not wish to have her name mentioned at all in connection with it. I said that was fine, that I just wanted to track down Jim Suter for a story I was writing about a quilt panel that had mysteriously appeared with Jim Suter's name on it, even though he is believed to be alive and well.

"She said wasn't that odd, as if she'd never heard of the Suter panel. Obviously, I didn't mention your encounter with her, Don, and I didn't say anything about pages from Suter's campaign biography having been ripped off the panel—Bud Hively wouldn't have known about the campaign-bio pages. But I did ask her if she had visited the quilt display. She said no, she'd never seen it, but she said she'd heard it was big and colorful. Then I thanked her and said I supposed she was enjoying the fall foliage up in Pennsylvania—nature's quilt. She said, oh, yes, she certainly was."

I said, "You actually called the Pennsylvania fall scenery 'nature's quilt'?"

Timmy smiled slyly.

Chondelle said, "Timothy, it sounds to me like you're a natural at this. If I ever need somebody to tell a big fat lie for a good cause, I'm gonna call you."

Still looking almost smug, he said, "Don't bother. In the fu-lure, I'll only lie for Donald. This is something that's just be-iween me and my honey pie here."

I said, "What in God's name have I done? I may need to take you back to the priests, Timothy, and sign you up for an ethical lune-up."

He chuckled, but then Ray Craig rolled slowly by, and Timmy's mood abruptly darkened again. He said, "What does 11uit man want with us?"

Chapter 12

Bud Hively, the real one, was among Maynard's friends gathered at the ICU lounge outside the George Wash ington University Hospital unit where, by one o'clock Monday afternoon, Maynard was awake and answering yes-and-no questions by blinking. He had a black tube down his throat that looked like a creature from Alien emerging from his gullet, and so he was unable to speak. Only immediate family members were allowed into Maynard's room, two at a time, but Edwin Sudbury told the nurse in charge that we were all Maynard's siblings. "We're farmers," he said. "Big family." The nurse looked as if she had heard this many times before and did not find it clever, but she let us go in.

A District of Columbia police officer was seated on a desk chair that had been wheeled over to the entrance to Maynard's room. He gave each of us who entered the room a quick onceover, but he made no body search and failed to conduct even perfunctory interrogations of Maynard's visitors. Were Maynard to be finished off by a visitor, the cop would be good for a vague description, I guessed, but not much more.

Timmy and I went into the room together for a brief stay. Timmy spoke reassuring and affectionate words to Maynard, who stared up at us weakly, quizzically. He obviously had questions but no way of asking them. When Timmy asked him if he'd like an explanation as to why he was lying badly wounded in a hospital bed, Maynard blinked furiously, yes, yes. Timmy gave him a quick rundown of the shooting and the confusing aftermath. Maynard shook his head in amazement at Timmy's story. Then, apparently exhausted by his attempt to make sense of what had happened to him, he drifted off again. We gazed at Maynard a moment longer, outraged and sickened all over again at what had happened to our friend.

Back in the ICU lounge, Timmy and I managed to maneuver Bud Hively, the Blade writer, and Dana Mosel, the Post reporter, into a corner and then brought the conversation around to Jim Suter and the mysterious quilt panel. Hively was interested in Suter's fate because he knew him, and Mosel had managed to wangle an assignment from the Post metro editor to follow up on the odd panel and the just-as-peculiar act of vandalism.

"I talked to a woman at the Names Project in San Francisco," Mosel said, "and she gave me the name and address of the man in D.C. who submitted the panel last May. But there's no record of a David Phipps in or around the District. The phone number, which I called, is a fake, and the address is at a Capitol Hill Mailboxes, Etcetera. It would take a court order to find out who actually rented the box. Those private outfits contract with the Postal Service and they're subject to the same federal privacy laws that a post office has to observe."

Mosel, a slender, pretty, auburn-haired woman in a linen suit and a pair of well-worn tennis shoes, had her notebook out and flipped through it in search of additional details she thought might interest us. She had told Timmy earlier that she'd been in the Peace Corps in Malawi in the midsixties, and she'd gotten to know Maynard through the former-Peace-Corps-volunteer writers' network. This was a web of several hundred people whose reach into U.S. journalism and letters seemed to resemble, as Mosel had described it, Pat Robertson's idea of the grip of the II-luminati on eighteenth-century Europe.

"Amy Chavez, the Names Project staffer," Mosel went on, "was as mystified as everybody else by the Suter panel, and she said a lot of their people are unnerved by this thing. But they've never asked for death certificates or other documentation in the past, and she doubts they'll start doing it now. This type of weirdness just hasn't been a problem."

Bud Hively said, "There's a respect for the quilt—a reverence almost—that's felt even by most of the people who think it absorbs angry emotions that should be fueling political action instead. There's one panel made by a dead man's friends who wrote on the panel, 'He hated this quilt and so do we.' But they're still part of it, even if they think it's wrong, and I don't think they would play games with the quilt or desecrate it."

"No," Timmy said, "that would feel like an insult not to the quilt project but to all the people whose names are there."

Hively, a muscular, pug-nosed man with a shaved head and a mustache the color and shape of the pyramid at Chichen Itza, said he thought whoever had sent in the panel memorializing a man who'd been alive when the panel was submitted must have been consumed with bitterness. Hively said, "He must have hated Jim deeply to do a thing like that. And I guess he must have hated the quilt, too, to have used it so selfishly."

I said, "Do you know people who disliked Suter? Is he a man who makes enemies?"

Hively smiled knowingly and a little sheepishly. "Jim Suter broke a lot of hearts in gay Washington over the years."

"Yours included?" Mosel said. She still had her notebook out and added, "This is all on background, of course."

"Yeah," Hively said, and laughed uneasily. "I had a fling with Jim ten or twelve years ago. He was—to put it mildly—one of the most attractive men in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia back then. Really one of the most dazzling-looking men I'd ever seen. He still is, in fact—or was the last time I saw him. Jim was also smart, sexy, energetic, and he knew everybody and everything that went on in this town. And he wasn't shy about letting you know how popular he was either. I spent a night with him one time, and I wandered into Jim's kitchen around ten on a Sunday morning. He was there fixing breakfast while he was dishing the dirt on the speakerphone with—guess who? Nancy Reagan."

Timmy said, "God."

I said, "I don't suppose Suter is as wired into the Clinton White House as he was back in the Reagan era, or is he?"

"No, the Clinton gay mob—a large, moody, disappointed bunch of nice people, by and large—don't care much for Jim. His most intimate nonromantic ties have all been with Republicans," Hively said. "They knew he was gay, of course, but that didn't matter much to the Reagan crowd. These were Hollywood people. The Bush White House was stuffier, but even there Jim had his admirers."

"And his enemies?" I said.

Hively looked at me a little sadly now. "The people I know who didn't like Jim—and some of them loathed him deeply– were not political or professional or social enemies. They were all men who had fallen in love with him—which is the easiest, most natural thing in the world—and whom he had led on, and taken into his arms for a time, and then abruptly dumped. Jim seemed to take a kind of sadistic pleasure in doing that. Over the past twenty years, a lot—I mean a platoon, a battalion, a small army—of men have gone gaga over Jim Suter, and there were very few—only the dregs of the dregs really—that he ever turned away.

"But then, after a week or two, that was it. He wasn't a one-night-stand-then-never-again man, he was a two-week-stand-Ihen-never-again man, a very, very cruel thing to be. It was always a week or two of bliss, then suddenly—nothing. You are among the disappeared. He doesn't return your calls, he ignores you in public. And I am speaking to you not just from hearsay– although that's plentiful—but from grim experience. I'm over it now, I think. But for years I despised Jim Suter because he did lo me what he always does to men. He wrecked my head and then he broke my heart."

Mosel said, "Doesn't word get around that guys should avoid this shithead?"

"Sure," Hively said, "but in a transient town like D.C. there are always new heads arriving to be turned. And Jim has always been such a hunk that even men who know what they're in for often can't resist him. And even some who've heard of his rotten habit have to see for themselves what the big attraction is, and the repulsion, too."

Timmy said, "Maynard doesn't seem all that bitter about his affair with Suter. He said it didn't work out because he didn't like Suter's politics and he thought Suter was emotionally erratic. But it sounded as if it was a mutual parting of the ways and that was all."

"Maynard was a special case for Jim," Hively said. "Maynard is so self-confident and self-contained that as soon as Suter turned distant, Maynard just let it go. He once told me that he began to lose interest in Jim as soon as Jim started ignoring his calls. Maynard said that in Southern Illinois people just don't treat each other that way. It's rude, he told me. But then Jim turned around and started pursuing Maynard again. He always had to be the one doing the rejecting. So Maynard came back for a while, and then Jim backed off again, and soon afterwards, that was that. They both saw the game that was being played, and soon they'd both had enough of it."

"It sounds," I said, "as if Maynard came away from his affair with Suter uncharacteristically unscathed. So, who among Jim's long list of boyfriends that you know of was permanently embittered, even traumatized?"

Mosel still had her notebook on her lap, and when Hively glanced at it apprehensively, Mosel said, "I'm just listening."

"I hope so," he said. "If anybody asks, none of what I'm about to tell you came from me. I could probably name fifty gay men, if I really thought about it, who have been shit on by Jim Suter over the past twenty years. And most of them, if I asked them about it today, would probably chalk it up to experience and let it go at that. They'd just laugh it off and say, yeah, they had their own heartbreaker of a Jim Suter story, too. But four or five people that I know of were devastated by the way Suter treated them and are very, very angry. And one of them might still be mad enough to play a macabre joke on Jim, such as sending a panel to the AIDS quilt with Jim's name on it."

Mosel had shut her notebook, but now she was flipping its cover up and down absently. Hively's refusal to be used as a source for anything he had told her was plainly driving Mosel nuts. She blurted out, "Oh, come on, Bud. Let me have the names. I promise I'll keep you out of it and I can check them out discreetly."

"You can? I doubt that that's possible." "All right, so maybe it wouldn't be so discreet. But I won't mention your name. I can just call these guys up and say, 'I heard you dated Jim Suter and it ended unhappily, and do you have any idea how a panel with Suter's name on it made its way into the AIDS quilt?' Maybe I won't find anybody who'll admit it, but I might come across a Suter hater who knows who did do it, and who's mad at that guy, too, and who'll rat on him to the Post."

I said, "That sounds like a promising approach to me."

Hively slowly massaged his hairless head, as if to stimulate the cells responsible for decision making. "We can't be sure, of course, even that it was one of Jim's wounded lovers who sent in the quilt panel. The quilt stunt could be totally unrelated. And if it was an old boyfriend who did it, why would he and somebody else then vandalize the panel at the D.C. display?"

"To call attention to it," Timmy said. "So nobody in Washington would miss the act of revenge."

Hively let loose with a little sigh and said, "I guess you might as well go ahead. I'll give you the names. Just don't tell anybody the names came from me."

"Agreed," Mosel said. "I'm wondering something, Bud. Is there any particular reason, other than mere privacy, why you don't want these guys to know it was you who ID-ed them as former Suter boyfriends?"

Hively laughed. "It's not the ex-lovers I'm worried about. The problem is, I already gave the names to the Blade reporter covering the quilt display, and I don't want her to find out I also turned the names over to the Post."

"I guess I'm going to have to work fast," Mosel said dryly.

"Anyway, thanks."

Hively grew serious and said, "I'm telling you because I want to do everything I can to help expose the person who used the quilt in such a shabby way. I've got too many friends on there not to care a lot about this. I know that in the big picture the quilt is indestructible, and what it means is indestructible. But this was a miserable, selfish stunt, and it just hurts. I'm sure an awful lot of people have been sickened by it."

"I think so, too," Mosel said, "and so does my editor. That's

why it's news."

As Bud Hively described the five men whose detestation of Jim Suter was, Hively believed, abiding and even potentially violent, Mosel took notes on—and I carefully memorized—the sketches of Jim Suter's attenuated love affairs with Martin Dormer, Graham Houston, Jason Leibowicz, Bill Walker, and Peter Vicknicki.

As Hively spoke, I listened for any biographical suggestion that any of these men might be connected, however slightly, to Betty or Nelson Krumfutz, to Maynard, or to Mexico. I didn't hear any. But I picked up plenty of data to serve as a conversational icebreaker with Jim Suter, well-known Washington writer, heartthrob, and—the word that came to mind was an oddly old-fashioned one—cad.

Chapter 13

By four Monday afternoon, I was back in the hotel room working the phone. Timmy had the list of Jim Suter's family and friends that Bud Hively had given Dana Mosel on Sunday, and I had the names of the five embittered Suter ex-lovers that Hively had described to Mosel earlier on Monday. After several unproductive calls—answering machines and services, or no answer at all—I reluctantly called the airline and postponed my reservation to Cancun from Tuesday to Wednesday morning. I immediately felt pangs of regret, even irritation—mixed with a strange but powerful sense of relief—that I would not be leaving for the Yucatan first thing in the morning. But at the time I didn't realize what those pangs meant.

I was able to reach two of Jim Suter's friends, as well as his mother and brother in Maryland. With the friends and relatives I identified myself as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. This was a low subterfuge that would have disgusted my journalist friends but which I justified by Suter's own alleged precarious life-or-death situation. Admitting that I was a private detective might have tipped off one of the people Suter was afraid of that someone besides Maynard might be aware of Suter's terrible danger.

I guessed, though, that the angry ex-lovers would be unwilling to speak with a reporter, so I told the two I reached late Sunday afternoon that I was a private investigator employed by Jim's mother to look into the disturbing AIDS quilt panel. Timmy termed this particular lie "squalid," but he couldn't come up with an approach that was morally superior.

Anyway, it worked. By 5 p.m. Monday, I had interviews lined up with Suter's mother and brother at six-thirty, with Peter Vick-nicki and Martin Dormer, two of Suter's angry former lovers, later in the evening, as well as two of Suter's friends at lunchtime Tuesday.

Timmy phoned his boss, state assemblyman Myron Lip-shutz, in Albany and requested several days off "for personal reasons. " He told the politician he was unable to explain exactly what was going on, but he said he wanted Lipshutz to know how gratifying it had been working for him over the years and how much respect and affection he felt for the assemblyman.

It was obvious from Timmy's end of the rest of the conversation—"No, don't worry, I'm fine, Myron, really"—that Lipshutz had been unnerved by Timmy's remarks, which could easily have been interpreted as (a) a prelude to suicide, (b) the veiled announcement of a fast-moving terminal illness, or (c) an indication that Timmy had fallen under the influence of Deepak Chopra.

Afterward, I said, "It sounds as if you may have scared Myron to death."

"I guess I did leave him a little bit shaken. I didn't mean to frighten Myron. But after what happened to Maynard, I've got this heightened sense of the fragility of human existence—everybody's, including my own—and I feel impelled to tell people how I feel about them before it's too late."

I had never been seized by the need to exclaim my love to anyone other than my lover—for a WASP Presbyterian from New Jersey, that was chore enough—but I liked that Timmy could be selectively, though not promiscuously, spontaneous with his affections. He didn't need to tell me how he felt about me—he'd done it countless times over the years with all the force and clarity of his strong Irish heart—but he did tell me yet again, and I replied unexpectedly in kind. We made love, and it was excellent.

Soon, though, my mind divided, and part of it began to wrestle with ways of clearing up the Jim Suter-Maynard Sudbury complex mystery at the earliest possible moment, and of extrieating Timmy and me—and Maynard—from it. Just as I did not want to live in a state of fear and paranoia, neither did I want to live with—or to live with a man with—a twenty-four-hour-a-day overwhelming sense of doom. As Timmy and I excitedly generated sweat and other fluids, I also couldn't seem to help imagining, a bit guiltily, my upcoming encounter with the beringleted former wrestling star, Jim Suter, although I did that only for a fleeting moment.

My six-thirty meeting with Jim Suter's mother and brother at Mrs. Suter's condo in Silver Spring was not only unhelpful in any specific way—neither George nor Lila Suter knew much about Jim's private life, they told me several times—but I immediately sensed that both of them were continually lying, at least by omission.

Both Suters were handsome, conservatively dressed people who looked as if they would have been comfortable posing for a Buick ad in Town & Country. They served cocktails and hors d'oeuvres and chatted volubly about themselves in a way that felt just a little forced. Mrs. Suter was a real estate agent and George a computer-program analyst for a big Maryland HMO. It came out in the conversation that Mrs. Suter had been married four times and George twice. Both were currently unattached.

Mrs. Suter had agreed to meet with a reporter, she said, in order to reassure me. She said she was certain that the quilt panel with her son's name on it was "a prank." The vandalism of the panel was harder to explain, she said, but "nothing James gets mixed up in ever surprises me," she added with a laugh. "James has always gone his own way." She said she had told the Post reporter the same thing and was surprised that editors might continue to consider the incident newsworthy.

"I've been told," I said, "that Jim may be out of the country, and that's why he hasn't responded personally to the quilt-panel mystery. Is that the case?"

George Suter glanced at his mother, who hesitated for just an instant before replying, "I think he is, yes. That's the case in-sofar as any information I have." Her language was flat and without nuance, but she spoke to me in the "gracious" tone I guessed she employed with potential buyers and sellers in her real estate business.

"You aren't sure where Jim is?" I asked.

"No, not precisely," she said. "He did say he thought he might be abroad for some time. But Jim's travel plans hadn't quite firmed up the last time we spoke." Mrs. Suter and her son both peered at me now in a way that said no additional information would likely be forthcoming on this topic.

"When were you last in touch with Jim? Either of you."

"To tell you the truth," George said, "I haven't seen Jim—or talked to him at all—since early summer sometime, I'd say it was. I don't recall his discussing any particular trip he had planned. But Jim has always been something of a gadabout, and he doesn't always inform me or Mother where he's off to or when he'll be back. It's actually a rather annoying habit Jim has." Suter, who appeared to be in his midthirties, had a head full of the famous male-Suter locks, and they were indeed golden and fell across his brow fetchingly.

"So Jim might not be out of the country, just out of the Washington area?"

"That's right," George said. "Jim hasn't answered his telephone or returned messages for some time. So I'd say there's a good possibility that he's out of town."

"That would be my guess, too," Mrs. Suter added.

Jim Suter's mother and brother sat watching me with eyes that looked as if they were going to reveal nothing because the Suters did not intend for them to reveal anything. I guessed they were not only lying—poorly—but that they knew Suter was in trouble and probably that he was in trouble in Mexico. But if that's all they knew, then there was no point in pressing them, for I already knew that much and more. And if they knew more than I did, they certainly weren't about to reveal it to a newspaper reporter from Baltimore. They had agreed to see me, they said, only to dampen interest in the strange quilt panel and the vestigatory quest, and I headed back out in the direction of the Silver Spring metro station.

As I -walked away from Mrs. Suter's building—La Fuente, it was called, spelled out next to the entrance in a silvery script– I turned and looked up at the location where I estimated her third-floor balcony must have been. In the dimness behind the glass door at the rear of the balcony, two figures were standing and seemed to be watching me go.

Chapter 14

When I met Timmy at eight at a Thai restaurant near Dupont Circle that had been recommended by one of Maynard's friends, he was despondent. He told me that he had just visited Maynard again. And while Maynard's condition had been upgraded from stable to fair, Timmy hated seeing his friend so weak and damaged, so helpless, so not the person Maynard had always been.

" 'Fair,' they're labeling him," Timmy said. "He didn't seem so 'fair' to me. I asked him if he felt 'fair,' and he shook his head. But I told him he was improving, day by day, and he nodded and—I think—tried to shrug. But if what Maynard is is 'fair,' I'd hate to see him doing poorly."

"You did see him doing poorly Saturday night, on that sidewalk in front of his house. 'Fair' is preferable to that."

"True."

"Any estimate on when Maynard will be able to speak?"

"Maybe tomorrow, the nurse said. And I'm not the only one waiting to talk to Maynard. You-know-who was up in Maynard's room nosing around a while ago."

"Ray Craig?"

"Smelly Ray."

"When you and I met, I must have smoked as much as Ray does. I must have stunk that way, too."

"You did. It was awful."

"How did you stand it?"

"You said you intended to quit. And you did. Anyway, I'd spent a month once visiting an Indian friend who lived next to a chemical-fertilizer factory in Poona. So I'd developed an adaptability toward vile odors when the cause was good."

"Lucky for me."

"Yep. Me too."

Timmy and I were seated at a table for four against a side wall at the Bangkok Flower. We were waiting for our two dinner companions, Martin Dormer and Peter Vicknicki, two of Jim Suter's embittered former lovers who had since met and become friends. We didn't know what they looked like, but the maitre d' had been alerted to send them our way.

I asked Timmy if Ray Craig had spoken to him, and he said, "Yes, and he asked where you were."

"What did you say?"

"I told him you were dropping some clothes off at the dry cleaner's."

I laughed. "Why did you say that? I think I know."

Timmy laughed, too. "You probably do. It was the first thing that popped into my head, and I guess I was trying to plant the idea that maybe Ray ought to have some clothes dry-cleaned, too. Although, Don, even Freud said, sometimes a cigar is only a cigar."