Текст книги "A Shock to the System "

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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"Mincin' Bill Clinton," Moody said, waving a mocking limp wrist.

"Clinton is gay? I never heard that."

"Oh, honey, where have you been?" Moody said. "No, really.

Gennifer Flowers was one of his beards, and so was that other one."

I said, "I suppose you arrived at this conclusion based on the president's initial position on gays in the military."

"Oh, no," Moody said. "It's not just that. I've seen copies of depositions from men who have slept with Missy Clinton. You can send away for those."

"Well," I said, "this explains a lot."

They both nodded sagely.

"Tell us about your study on deviance," Stover said. "Did you say on the phone that you're doing a deviance survey for Dr. Crockwell?"

"Yes, I am. He couldn't provide me the names of any group members, of course. But Larry Bierly did, and I'm grateful that even though you hate Larry's guts you're still willing to participate in the study."

"Will you be asking questions about our former sexual practices?" Moody said.

They both looked expectant, but I said, "No, it's treatment programs that I'm most interested in. I'm doing a study on comparative methods of treatment for deviance."

They both said, "Oh."

"I'd like to hear more about Dr. Crockwell's program from the patient's point of view. The dynamic of the group you were in interests me especially."

They both looked bored. Group dynamics was not what they hoped to discuss with me.

"The group part wasn't all that great," Moody said. "I mean, it was important—learning guy things and all. But for Roland and I, the individual treatment Dr. Crockwell had to offer was what really turned things around for us."

"What did the individual treatment consist of?"

"Aversion therapy, it's called. Where the incorrect sexual conditioning that was done by our parents is corrected by punishing wrong sexual thoughts and rewarding right ones."

"Zapping the demons," Stover added. "Casting out the evil spirits."

"Electric shocks were used?"

"Yeah, everybody went over to Dr. Crockwell’s three times a week," Moody said. "You could do it two ways. You'd get wired up with electrodes and look at slides of naked women and hot guys. If you were on automatic, you'd get zapped whenever the picture showed humpy guys but not when it was tits and pussy. Or you could do it yourself—zap yourself when guys were on and you started getting hard. If you stayed stiff, you could turn up the dial till it really hurt a whole lot, and that usually did the trick."

"It's remarkable," I said, "that so simple a procedure could actually reverse sexual orientation."

"It's not just the therapy," Moody said. "It's a deep commitment, too, to normalcy."

Stover added, "The Lord would have made Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve, if he had meant for men to fuck each other in the butt."

"Are you ever tempted to backslide?" I asked. "No pun intended."

"Once in a while," Moody said, looking troubled. "Dr. Crockwell told us this would occur in some patients. But Roland and I have figured out ways of dealing with that."

They both looked at me uncertainly.

I said, "How?"

"We look at dirty pictures together," Stover said. "Or once in a while videos."

I said, "I guess that falls under the heading of giving the devil his due."

Stover looked at me suspiciously, and Moody wasn't sure he liked the sound of that either.

I said, "How do you create the electric shocks? I hope you're not risking death or serious injury with a toaster or anything like that, guys."

"Oh, no, no," Stover said. "We use a safe device like Dr. Crockwell's. The one we have is called a Lustbuster. You can get them

through Christian religious-supply catalogs. Would you like to see it?"

"We could demonstrate how it's used," Moody said, "if you'd be interested for your survey."

My impulse was to dive through a window. But that might have been seen as overreacting, so I said, "The device sounds interesting, but I'd like to know more about the group therapy sessions. It must have been difficult having men in the group who resisted treatment at one level or another, unlike you eager beavers."

"I can tell you it was a real bitch," Moody said. "You just felt like you were surrounded by traitors."

I said, "That wasn't true for the first eight months, was it? I thought Larry and Paul pretty much observed the spirit of the occasion until they decided to leave. And that all happened in just one session last fall."

"Oh, I'm sure that's what Miss La-di-da Larry would have you believe," Moody said. "That they were such angels. Well, my dear, I can assure you that they were not."

"Dr. Crockwell was there to help us with our sexual dysfunctions," Stover said, panting and jabbing his finger. "And Paul and Larry were always bringing all kinds of problems that had nothing to do with deviancy—drinking and drugs and money problems and stuff like that. As for those, we were there to discuss just one topic," Stover said, brandishing a finger.

And I knew by then what that was. I said, "Who had the alcohol and drug problem?"

"Paul was an alcoholic and Larry was a druggie," Moody said. "They were always dishing and criticizing each other, and one thing I hold against Dr. Crockwell is, he let them go on like that too much. We weren't there to deal with topics like that, and we didn't need to hear it. Like Roland says, we'd paid our money to talk about one thing."

"But wouldn't you say that drugs and alcohol are a common way for men unhappy with their sexuality to cope with it, or avoid coping with it? It's often part of the picture that has to be addressed."

"'But not always bickering the way those two did," Moody said. "Take it to AA or NA, Grace, or keep it on the street."

"I'd heard Paul was an alcoholic," I said, "but I wasn't aware of Larry's drug problem. What kind of drugs did he do?"

Stover looked blank, but Moody's recall on the subject was instant. "He was into both Ecstasy and acid, I know. They had a real catfight over it right in the group one time, and Paul accused Larry of spending money that he needed for his business on drugs. Of course, Paul was the one who was always in trouble over money, and Larry reminded him of it and told him to just butt out."

"It didn't surprise me one bit," Stover said, "when I heard that Paul ended up dead in the gutter. Since he had turned his back on righteousness, it was the best thing he could do for himself."

I said, "Paul may not have killed himself. He may have been murdered. The police are looking into the possibility."

Neither of them reacted dramatically to this news. Moody pursed his lips and got a quizzical look, and Stover just kept looking hard and mean and unaffected by the fate of a man he didn't approve of.

"Who do they think did it?" Moody finally said.

"They don't know. Who can you think of who might have had a reason to kill Paul? Or hated him enough to want to?"

"It was probably queer-boy Bierly," Stover said. Moody pondered this briefly and then nodded.

"Why do you think Larry would kill Paul? They had their disagreements, but they were lovers, after all."

"That's exactly what I mean," Stover snarled. "Homos are unstable people. You keep taking it up the butt, sooner or later you'll crack. It happens all the time. Don't you watch Pat Robertson?"

I said I'd only tuned in briefly. "What about Dr. Crockwell?" I asked. "He's a suspect in the eyes of some. And he was certainly upset with Paul for leaving the group."

"Oh, Mary! Gimme a break, puh-leeze!" Moody squealed.

"Who's going around saying such a thing?" Stover roared. "The

idea of slandering a man of Dr. CrockwelFs standing in the community is character assassination."

I said, "Crockwell doesn't have an alibi, either. On the Thursday night Paul Haig died, Dr. Crockwell was alone in his office until after midnight, he says. Interestingly, the same is true for last Thursday night, when someone shot Larry Bierly in the Millpond Mall parking lot."

They both got an I-smell-a-rat look. "Then maybe it was one of Dr. Crockwell's patients or former patients," Moody said, "and they were trying to pin something on him. Everybody who ever went to him knew Dr. Crockwell worked all by himself in his office on Thursday night. It's when you could call there and he'd answer the phone at night instead of you getting his answering machine."

"Is there anyone in the group who might have wanted to do that?" I asked. "I mean, set Crockwell up?"

"Dr. Crockwell was a beloved guy figure to all of us," Stover harrumphed. "He was a role model and a pal. Except to Larry and Paul, of course, those Judases who betrayed us all."

"Anyway," Moody said, "Dr. Crockwell had three other groups going all the time, ten homos in a group. And if you count people from other years, hundreds of ex-gays must know about his Thursday-night routine."

With a sinking feeling, I said, "I guess that would be true. Is either of you acquainted with a man by the name of Steven St. James?"

Moody shook his head, and Stover said, "No, is he a saint?"

I said I didn't know for sure, but I doubted it.

18

On Sunday morning, cool and rainy, Timmy had gone out and come back with bagels and the Times, and the kitchen was an aromatic Malabar Coast as he prepared his masala tea. Perhaps on that day in Visakhapatnam, twenty-six years after Timmy's Peace Corps leave-taking, an American ritual he had left behind was being reenacted similarly—a middle-aged Indian was sitting and picking the lint off his socks or whatever. I preferred what Timmy had brought home to what I imagined he had left behind. But my imagination in these matters was limited, as I was reminded whenever Timmy's Peace Corps crowd got together and conversed in the patois of their exotic youth with its references to chicken sexing and blood meal, and place names that sounded like long, quick combinations of vowels, consonants and simmering lentils.

I got on the phone. I reached my Department of Motor Vehicles contact at home. He called back three minutes later and, having spoken with a member of the weekend crew keeping an eye on the department's computer system, informed me that the two cars in Lord Chatterley's driveway, the Caddy and the Continental, were registered to Mr. Emil Provost, of that address in Schuylers Landing. The name rang no bell, but why would it?

I couldn't think of anybody I knew in Schuylers Landing, so I called a friend who worked for the New York State Historical Society and asked her about a member of the landed gentry in Schuylers Landing named Emil Provost. She had never heard of him, but she knew who to call downriver. Ten minutes later I had

been informed that: Emil Provost was the surviving patriarch of an old Hudson River family that had made a lot of early money in canal shipping and later money in railroads; Provost and his wife, Ina, had two daughters and a son, all living in Greene County and involved in banking and real estate; both Emil and Ina Provost were patrons of worthy causes, she historical preservation, he naturalist organizations. He was also part-owner of the Hudson Valley Game Farm, I was told, and I thought: "farm." Steven St. James had not been at home on Saturday because "the farm is open now."

I phoned the game farm, a touristy zoo and wild-animal preserve off the thruway, and asked for St. James—I did not slip and call him "Mellors"—and was told that he was not available at the moment, but would I like to leave a message? I said no thanks.

When I'd gotten home Saturday night I found a message on my machine from my credit-check contact. She had informed me, with full particulars, that Larry Bierly's financial situation was stable, that his business financing was stretched to the limit but his cash flow was sufficient to keep him afloat. Paul Haig, on the other hand, had been on the edge of financial collapse when he died. As Bierly had told me truthfully, it was only his personal intercession after Haig's death that had saved Beautiful Thingies from being snatched back by Haig's creditors.

I said to Timmy, "I've got it."

" 'It'?" He was absorbed in the Times crossword puzzle, and I knew I would have access to only about a tenth of his brain until he had either completed the puzzle or, after inner pain, made the mature decision to put the puzzle aside unfinished and resume his life.

"I think I know why Paul died."

He looked at me interestedly across the dining room table, his pencil still poised. "Why?"

"He died because he was trying to blackmail someone to get hold of enough money to save his business. As you theorized, he had gone to his mother for money and she had turned him down. That's why she's alternately guilt-ridden and delusionary over

what deep in her heart she thinks of as Paul's suicide—his suicide over impending financial ruin. But Haig told Bierly a week before he died that his financial troubles were over, that he'd come up with a way to pay off his debt. He didn't tell Bierly how he was raising the cash, because he couldn't—it was illegal."

Timmy put his pencil down.

"The other reason he couldn't tell Bierly was, Bierly probably knew the person Haig was blackmailing and even the guilty secret that made the blackmail possible. Had he been informed of the blackmail attempt, Bierly might have objected—on ethical grounds, or even fear of his own involvement and exposure."

Timmy said, "That's plausible, but where's the evidence of any of it?"

"I haven't found any yet. But get this: Bierly, Crockwell, St. James and St. James's landlord—whose name is Emil Provost, I now know—all seem to have been mixed up in something together none of them wants to talk about. That thing is what Haig was using to blackmail one of them. The next question is, Which one? Bierly, of course, was not a candidate for blackmail, because in March he was still Haig's friend, if no longer lover, and anyway he had no ready cash. St. James is an unlikely target; he drives an old Rabbit and works in a game park with—by the smell of him—farm animals. He's not at all a good blackmailee.

"Crockwell is a possibility. He must have a few bucks in the bank that he's extracted over the years from his bevies of repentant buttfuckers. Though if Crockwell was being blackmailed by Haig, and then killed Haig to shut him up, why would Crockwell hire me and risk my uncovering three ugly truths—the blackmail, the thing that made the blackmail possible, and the murder?"

Timmy said, "That leaves—Provost? That sad old man?"

"Emil Provost is wealthy. There's a lot of oldish money in the family that appears not to have been misspent or otherwise dissipated. He's an ideal blackmail target."

He looked at me skeptically. "Do you really think that decrepit old aristocrat could have killed Paul Haig?"

"Haig wasn't strangled with some goon's bare hands," I said.

"Somebody he obviously knew somehow induced him to start drinking again and got him drunk and then dissolved the Elavil in his Scotch. Anybody of any age or background could have accomplished that."

"Sure—anybody who is completely without morals or human feelings. That old guy didn't strike me that way at all."

"Timothy, not every murderer looks like Charles Manson. You're talking as if you don't own a television set or read a daily newspaper. Dear hearts and gentle people who live and love in your hometown can have murder in their hearts. It happens somewhere every day."

After a moment he said, "That's true, sure. But I don't think that old guy is one of those. For him, murder would be—you know. In poor taste."

"That's exactly my point," I said. "Provost is a pillar of his community. He has everything to lose. As a blackmail target, he's a natural."

"He was cool and condescending to you, so that makes him a murderer? Nah, I don't believe it."

"That's not what I said."

"Anyway, what could they all have been mixed up in that Provost would actually kill somebody over to stop it from coming out?" -

I said, "I don't know."

"You don't have a clue?"

"No."

"That's a problem with your theory."

"It might have something to do with drugs," I said, without much conviction. "Moody and Stover, the low-voltage fetishists, told me Bierly and Haig used to argue about their drug habits in the therapy group—Haig's alcohol dependency and Bierly's penchant for street drugs. I'll have to look into that one some more. Otherwise, I won't know what they're all hiding until one of them decides to tell me. Bierly's a possibility. Once he understands that his and the others' dirty secret may have led to blackmail and Haig's murder, that should loosen him up."

"And if it doesn't?"

"I can try the same approach with both Crockwell and St. James."

"But," Timmy said, "if all of these people were involved in something that made them vulnerable to blackmail, wouldn't they already have speculated on the possibility that Paul had threatened one of the others with exposure and was killed for it? And thinking that, they haven't come forward so far for the same reason they won't in the future: Exposure of the mysterious foul goings-on would ruin their lives too."

"There is that," I said. "But there's another possibility, too, for finding out what Paul Haig might have been mixed up in with Bierly, Crockwell and St. James. There's another person he might have confided in."

"Not Mom?"

"Not a chance, is my guess. According to Bierly, the Haigs not only did not confide in one another, they lied to one another habitually. No, the man Haig may have trusted with the information that was so volatile that it got him killed is the man he went to for relief from the anxiety that that information and other stresses in his life were causing him. That man is Dr. Glen Snyder, the Ballston Spa psychiatrist Haig went to for the month before he died and who prescribed the Elavil that killed him."

"Do you think he'll talk to you? It's hard to imagine he would."

"Not," I said, "if I just walk in off the street. He might open up, however, if he is urged to do so by someone whose good opinion he needs and who is the family member who sent Paul Haig to him in the first place."

"Phyllis Haig. Back to her again. The client from hell."

"Oh, I've got plenty of those. Or did."

19

Sunday afternoon I drove over to Albany Med. I talked my way past the guard and into Bierly's room, but when I got there he refused to speak with me. I told him, "I think Paul was killed by someone he was trying to blackmail. It had to do with whatever you and Paul and Crockwell and St. James and Emil Provost were mixed up in together. If you want Paul's killer brought to justice, you've got to open up about this."

But he had already buzzed for the nurse, and when she arrived Bierly was looking at me peculiarly and slowly shaking his head.

"Just leave me alone, will you, please?" he said, not at all Garbo-like—Victor Mature-like was closer to it. The nurse said I would have to go, so I did.

Back on Crow Street, I sat down by the phone. Crockwell's home number was unlisted, and his machine answered at his office. I got no answer at the St. James number; he was probably still at the game farm. I started to dial Phyllis Haig, but checked my watch—1:40—and figured I might make out better at that time of day if I met her face-to-face. Timmy had gone off with some friends to a lecture at SUNY on the evils of the Guatemalan military. I drove up to Latham for my own encounter with a kind of human-being-as-banana-republic.

"I don't want to talk to you, I said you are fired—F-I-R-E-R-E-D. Can't you understand English? Do I have to call a cop?" She was standing barricade-like in her front doorway, a low glass in her hand.

I said, "Look, Paul did not commit suicide. You were right

when you called me the first time. I keep trying to tell you, Phyllis, that there is evidence pointing to the likelihood that Paul was murdered. I need to talk to you about it, and I need your help in identifying Paul's killer."

She looked more worn out than relieved by this assertion, as if the thing she was least able to cope with now was additional thought.

"Oh, Christ on a crutch," she finally said resignedly. "Come on in and let me fix you a drink."

I followed her through the foyer of a rambling split-level house full of horsey prints and Duncan Phyfe reproductions of unvarying constricted good taste, the sort of decor Joseph Stalin might have chosen for the Kremlin had he been from Connecticut. The one touch of modern-day-Haig authenticity in the place, and of life, was Phyllis Haig herself. She'd gotten her makeup to fit almost exactly over its intended place on her face, and she had on a pair of silky pale blue slacks that were casually hippy and an orange blouse with plenty of demurely rouged decolletage.

She said, "We better head for the den if we know what's good for us."

What was good for Phyllis was a cigarette and a refill, and I had a reactionary but well-chilled Coors.

"I don't know why you're still pestering me," she said, draping herself across a chintz couch. I chose the well-worn manly leather chair facing her that must have been her late husband's seat. "You keep missing the point, Donald, that I've had it up to here with you and with this whole goddamn stinking load of crap. I should never have called you in the first place. I should have gone to Arizona with Helen Small when she tried to get me to hop on a plane and blow this Popsicle stick. But no, I didn't listen to Helen. Just to get even with that stupid little pansy Larry Bierly, I had to start picking at scabs and opening up running sores and dredging up a lot of ugliness and heartbreak. Well, I learned my lesson on this one, Don, that's for goddamned certain. Never again, never again. Not ever, ever, ever."

What was she trying to say? "I'm a little hazy on that, Phyllis. Never again what?"

"Some people can get away with murder and there's nothing you can do about it. My husband told me a hundred times if he told me once, when you run into one of those people who can get away with anything they damn well please, don't screw around with them. It's just not worth it."

"Who do you think is getting away with murder?" I said, and as I said it, it suddenly sounded as wacky to me as it must have sounded to Phyllis Haig.

"Why, Larry Bierly! What the hell do you think I've been telling you for the last five days, for chrissakes?" She stared at me as if I were armed and dangerous.

I said, "I got the wrong impression from something you said over the phone, Phyllis. I'm sorry about the confusion. I misunderstood and got the idea from the way you reacted to some things I said about Paul's financial situation at Beautiful Thingies that you felt you were somehow responsible for his death."

She sagged. "Oh, that's what you thought?"

"I'm sorry."

She blew smoke over her left shoulder and then peered at me through narrowed eyes. After a moment she said, "Well, it's the goddamned truth."

"What's the truth?"

She took in another lungful for strength. "It's true that I'm partly responsible for my son's death, goddamnit to hell."

When she just sat watching me with a look of defiance tinged with despair, I said, "In what way are you partly responsible?"

She shuddered and then shook her head. "Why am I telling you this?"

"Because you have to tell someone, Phyllis."

That got a snort. "What bullshit. I know verbal diarrhea is in style, but I've done without it for fifty-some years and I don't intend to take up the disgusting habit now. No, I'm spilling my guts to you, Don, because I think you are a pathetically naive

man and I want to educate you. What you can learn from me will come in handy in your line of work. And I won't even charge you for it."

"Thank you, Phyllis."

She ingested and inhaled. The drinking was painful to watch, but she smoked with such fierce pleasure that it took me back to when I was young and easy under the apple boughs and constantly sucking on a Chesterfield or an Old Gold and finding happiness if not health in every drag.

Abruptly, she said tightly, "Paul came to me for money. I refused to give it to him."

She watched me for a reaction, but I offered none.

She went on. "After Paul left Vernon Crockwell's program, Crockwell called me. He advised me to shut Paul out—disown him, is what Crockwell was saying, even though he never used the ugly word. He said if Paul wanted anything from me to make sure I gave it to him only if Paul first agreed to go back into Crockwell's program. He also said it would be best if Paul started fresh, without Larry Bierly, because Bierly was probably a hopeless case, a man who wanted to be a pervert. Crockwell said this approach might be a tough row to hoe for me, but it was in Paul's best interest in the long run."

Another gulp of whatever was in the glass.

"I'd already paid Crockwell over eight K," She said. "And I figured a man who can rake in that kind of money from zinging people with cattle prods, or whatever it is he does, and getting them to think normal smutty thoughts, must know what he's doing. So when Paul asked me for sixty thousand dollars in March, I said I'd give it to him only after he went back into Crockwell's program and finished it and Crockwell personally guaranteed me that Paul had come out normal. That's a lot of money for a warranty, but normalcy is worth money."

I said, "But Paul didn't accept the offer."

"No," she said grimly. "He said he might go back to Crockwell sometime—he'd have to think about that. Apparently he still had dick on his mind. He'd already started seeing Glen Snyder, who'd

put him on the Elavil, but that was only making him feel less anxious, not more normal. The main thing was, Paul said, he needed the sixty thousand right away, for business reasons."

"But not," I said, "Larry Bierly's business reasons. You told me on Wednesday that it was Larry Bierly's business that was in trouble. But you misspoke yourself, I take it."

She sprayed smoke my way, then shrugged. "Whatever. The point is, Donald—if you are the least bit interested in the point– the point is, Paul needed the money sooner than I was willing to give it to him. And when I begged off, he—he did something dumb. I saw Paul a week later and Paul said he no longer needed the sixty K and that he had come up with another source. But it wasn't a way of raising cash that Paul should ever have used."

This left her mute and looking a little queasy. I said, "I assume you mean blackmail."

She stiffened. "How did you know?"

"I was told blackmail had been used previously by a member of your family."

"Who told you that?"

"Paul told Larry Bierly, who told me, that your husband once tried to blackmail a public official and this became known."

She deflated, looking glum. "That's the way some people interpreted the situation at the time—people who had their own reasons for seeing my husband left out in the cold in a certain investment situation. Paul was young at the time, but Deedee told him about it, and Paul somehow got it into his head that this was a viable way of doing business that you can get away with. If he'd still been alive, my husband would have set Paul straight on that one, that's for goddamn sure. But Lew was gone and Paul had this idea. So when he came around for a handout in March and I said no dice, not until you're normal, he came back a week later and said not to worry, he was raising the cash another way, using 'an old Haig family tradition,' he called it. Knowing how kids' minds work, I knew exactly what that was supposed to mean."

"Did you ask him what it meant?"

"We discussed it. I told him he was asking for trouble."

"But Paul made plain to you that he was blackmailing someone to raise the sixty thousand dollars he said he needed to save his business? That was spelled out?"

"It was clear enough." She straightened up and lit another Camel Light with the butt end of the last one.

"Did he say who he was blackmailing and what information he was using to do it with?"

"No, but I knew. I knew."

"How did you know?"

"Well, who the hell else would it be except that conniving little sexual deviate that had ruined Paul's life and kept him from being the real man he could have been if that treacherous little cock-sucker hadn't waved his pretty dick under Paul's nose and gotten him all sexually confused again? That's who!"

Not this again. I said, "Phyllis, surely you aren't referring to Larry Bierly."

"Of course I am!"

"But why would Paul blackmail Bierly? First of all, he was his friend. Secondly, Bierly had no money. He was in debt himself."

She cocked an eyebrow and gave me her oh-you-poor-naive-kid look. "Donald, sometimes you do amaze me. To think I almost paid you good money to work for me for—a gazillion dollars or whatever it was you wanted to hold me up for. Now pay attention, Elmer Fudd, here's the deal. Those two weren't friends. They were two queers. It was all sex. Buttfucking and whatnot. This is not healthy, and that's why homosexuals are always having catfights and can't be trusted and will never get along. It's a sickness. People of this type are not capable of true, lasting friendships with other men."

She watched me, gauging my reaction. I said, "The empirical evidence shows that you are badly mistaken, Phyllis. But do go on."

She raised her drink, acknowledging what she seemed to interpret as my conceding a point. "And anyway," she said, "even if fag-boy Bierly had no cash, he had the equity in his business and

he could have raised the money. And he would have done it too, you can bet your bottom dollar on that."

I swigged from my glass of beer. I tried to imagine what it must have been like growing up with Phyllis Haig, and my heart went out anew for her lost son, his sanity squeezed and beaten out of him long before he knew it.

I said, "Why would Larry Bierly have sold his business and let Paul blackmail him, Phyllis?"

She said, "He had pictures."

"Paul did?"

"He told me he had photographs."

"Of what?"

She gave her head a firm shake. "Paul never told me and, believe me, I did not want to know."

"He said he had incriminating or damaging photos of Larry Bierly? He specifically mentioned Bierly's name?"