Текст книги "Tongue tied"

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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The assistant prosecutor in charge doubted his office could make obstruction of justice stick, so the top man decided to pass, in spite of pressure from Tarbell and Albany city hall."

"Bill Keck," I said. "A Jimmy Carter appointee who always struck me as a reasonable man. I never knew just how reasonable."

Welch was looking at me intently. He said, "Lyle described you as some kind of anarchist. A hippie without the incense and the love beads. But it sounds as if you knew exactly what you were doing, and you were nimble as hell."

Anarchist? Hippie? Were? "I've managed to right a few wrongs over the years in a borderline sort of way and still stay out of Leavenworth. I've also wronged a few rights, but we don't need to get into those."

Barner snorted and said, "I'll say."

"What else is in the FBI report on the FFF?" I asked. "I'd like to see it."

"Stop by the precinct and I'll make you a copy," Barner said. "But overall it's the same names Diefendorfer gave us, and not even as up-to-date. The file is fun to read, though.

I wish I had the cojones to pull off some of the stunts the old FFF guys got away with."

We both looked at Welch, who I guessed we all knew had a similar wish for Barner.

But Welch just said, "I'd like to read the report, too, but later. I've gotta be somewhere at eight-thirty."

Barner tensed, and I guessed I knew what that meant. While we had burgers, Barner told stories of some of the old FFF's more daring exploits as described in the FBI files, and then Welch departed. As I left with Barner for his office and then my train back to Albany, I asked Barner if Welch had a date with someone else.

"There are two of them," Barner said. "Dave asked me to come along, but I'm not into that. He's asked me several times, even though he knows that's not what I want in a relationship. They're constantly doing poppers and shit like that. The three of them also use other substances, Dave admitted to me one time, that no police officer should get anywhere near, personally speaking. This isn't for me, Stra-chey. I want Dave, I go for Dave, but this is not who I am."

I wondered if Barner had figured out that, since Welch repeatedly offered things that were repugnant to Barner, the offer was either a cruel taunt or perhaps not sincerely meant. Now I was feeling sorry for Barner and guilty all over again.

Chapter 11

Timmy said, "If you'd join the twenty-first century and carry a cellphone, I could have reached you."

"You could have located me through Lyle, through NYPD. I was with Lyle at a bar in the Village, and you could have had him paged. What you've come up with is terrifi-cally important. Of course, it is better that Lyle not know about Zinsser just yet. I want to check this llama-farm thing out on my own first, along with Thad Diefendorfer."

"Right," Timmy said. "You and Thad, the Mennonite middle-aged caper artist. The Lavender Hill mob rises again."

We were seated on the glider out on our back deck under the summer stars, which were just barely visible through the blaze of Friday-night light from nearby Lark Street, Albany's Via Veneto. Timmy had made some of his superb guacamole, a skill he had mastered, inexplicably, during his Peace Corps tour in India. He had also brought out a Molson for me, and for himself a chardonnay selected for its fluty tone and delightfully twee outlook, as well as for its reasonable cost at the Delaware Avenue Price Chopper.

I said, "When they decided to rob the Bank of England, the Lavender Hill mob were mostly over-the-hill has-beens, whereas I am an accomplished professional investigator at the peak of my powers. So the has-been description certainly doesn't apply to me."

"Of course not."

"And when you meet him, you'll see that while Thad's guerrilla-activity skills might be rusty from disuse, he's as keen and fit as ever."

"Fit and keen. Sounds good."

"Of course, I didn't know him way back when."

"Explain to me again," Timmy said, "why you're pairing up with Diefendorfer to work ahead of Barner and the police instead of with them. I still don't quite get that."

"Oh?"

"What it sounds like is, you've resumed your twenty-year-old head games with Lyle, where you two play out your sexual attraction to each other-which for practical and personality reasons is futile-with complex little rituals of mutual psychological abuse. I used to be the not-directly-involved third party in the ritual, but now it's Thad Diefendorfer. Having Diefendorfer involved instead of me adds an extra charge, because however uninterested you are in him on a conscious level, he sounds like he's just enough of a turn-on to get you radiating little testosteronal vibrations that Lyle picks up and which drive him up the wall.

"Which is what nature apparently intended for you and Lyle to do to each other now and unto eternity. Plus, of course, Diefendorfer does sound like an interesting guy to be around, so I'll envy you that. If, that is, you decide to proceed with this plan to free Leo Moyle on your own, ostensibly to save the neo-FFFers from their own wretched excesses. But I have to say that the whole thing sounds pretty wacky to me."

Almost from the moment we met, Timmy had a way of explaining me to me with such thoroughness and stark plausibility that it threatened to use up all the analytical oxygen in the room. It was one of the reasons I was in awe of him, and when he did it, it filled me with love and terror. My conflicting impulses were always to adore him unabashedly, or to get my revolver out of the bedroom closet and pump him full of hot lead.

I said, "There may be a certain amount of truth in what you say."

"Uh-huh."

"But one part you're leaving out is, Lyle is far more dis-combobulated by me than I am by him."

"I'll take your word for that."

"So my working closely alongside Lyle, as opposed to in approximate tandem with him, would actually hurt the investigation. Lyle going around unhinged would not be good for Leo Moyle, for Jay Plankton, or for Lyle himself."

"Surely not, no."

"And, as for Thad Diefendorfer's playing out recover-your-youth adventure fantasies-or, should you choose to think of such a thing as being my own motivation here, laughable as that diagnosis is-if either of us actually happened to be so motivated, so what? It's for a good cause, halting dangerous criminal activity. And, if we succeed, we'll be well-armed with both influence and knowledge in case we decide to chasten or just dilute the influence of the ghastly Jay Plankton-or even, if we can, ruin him for life."

"Well then," Timmy said, "it looks like you're going to do it. Whatever 'it' is."

"You bet."

"In for a penny, in for a pound."

"There comes your Georgetown education again."

"I'll wager you were exposed to similar thinking at Rutgers."

The starlight reflected off Timmy's pale Gaelic half-profile, which I never tired of viewing from different angles, and off his wineglass, which he raised in a salute to the inevitable, more dubious surprises from me.

I said, "I'm amazed you tracked down Kurt Zinsser so fast."

"It was easy. Billy Blount, though, is long gone from Albany. He works for the Bank of America's office in Singapore, where he's got a Chinese boyfriend. The senior Blounts are still here in Albany, but Billy has as little contact with them as he can get away with. I learned all this from Christine Porterfield, who still runs Here 'n' There 'n'

Everywhere Travel with Margarita Mayes out at Stuyvesant Plaza. They visited Billy in Singapore last fall, where they celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of their rescue by Kurt Zinsser and the FFF."

I said, "The FFF has such a noble history, it really is a shame that the name has been tainted by-whoever."

"Billy, Chris and Margarita had not been in touch with Zinsser himself for many years,"

Timmy said. "But they knew where he was, because a friend of Chris's in the Berkshires got interested in llamas, visited Zinsser's farm last summer, and recognized the name. When the friend mentioned Chris and Billy to Zinsser, though, he cooled off, Chris said, and showed no interest in reestablishing contact. So the friend dropped the subject and stuck to discussing raising llamas."

"Where in the Berkshires is the farm?"

"Monterey, Mass. Zinsser has an operation of some local renown. He produces something called Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese."

"Woolly cheese?"

"It has quite a reputation, Chris says. You can pick it up at a number of health-food and New Age-type stores over here."

"There's wool in the cheese?"

"I wondered about that, too. It's a soft cheese, and apparently you suck it out of the wool. The oil in llama fur contains some kind of protein that's healthful in a variety of ways and is supposedly conducive to spiritual well-being. There are pre-Columbian Inca legends about woolly llama cheese, according to Zinsser's advertising, Chris says."

"Hmm."

"I know. A nice, ripe Camembert sounds more uplifting to me."

"So, up and down the Berkshires-from Tanglewood to Mass MoCA to the Norman Rockwell Museum-there are robust, spiritually improved people going around picking llama wool out of their teeth?"

"That's the report I received."

I said, "Then I think Zinsser is our man for sure-the harasser, sending Jay Plankton llama droppings and all the rest of it, and the kidnapper of Leo Moyle."

"Why are you so certain?" Timmy asked.

"Because he may once have been a mere radical gay lib-erationist, but now Zinsser sounds capable of just about anything. Woolly llama cheese? God."

"So, are you going to call the FBI? I probably don't have to remind you that transporting a kidnap victim across a state line is a federal crime."

"No," I said, finishing my Molson. "I still think it would be best for everyone concerned if I handled this myself. I'm going to call Thad. And since tomorrow is Saturday, maybe you could join us for a drive over to the scenic Berkshires."

Timmy looked doubtful. "Should I bring along a firearm?" he said.

"No, I'll handle that. You bring the toothpicks."

Chapter 12

Diefendorfer drove up from New Jersey in the morning, and by noon he and Timmy and I were on the road headed east. During the hour's drive over to Massachusetts, Thad told us stories of FFF rescues he had been involved in or had heard about from his cohorts. Most rescues, he said, were not especially difficult or dangerous; they involved winning over or just bribing lower-level mental hospital employees, many of whom were gay and often eager to be helpful. Doors were left unlocked, alarms disengaged or shorted out, escapees stashed in car trunks. Cash for bribes was always available in the FFF's later years as grateful young rescuees from wealthy families turned twenty-one and were not only immune to involuntary commitments but also gained access to their trust funds.

Rescues that could not be effectuated through these means were harder but also more exciting, Thad said. At one point a gay former cat burglar-rehabilitated after a stay in an Indiana penitentiary and retired from crime, he claimed-was brought in to teach a course in breaking and entering. Thad told us he had taken the course and was one of the foremost lock pickers in central New Jersey. Or had been; some locks worked electronically now, or were even computerized, and Diefendorfer had not kept up with the technology.

Timmy, educated by Jesuits, and Thad, the Mennonite second-story artist, had a good talk about Augustinian ideas of combating great evils by employing lesser evils if and when they became necessary. My own easygoing tendencies in these areas were well known to Timmy, who once described my companionship with moral relativism as "hair-raisingly blithe." He considered my late-adolescent departure from the Presbyterian Church "intellectually vacuous" mainly because it had turned Beethoven's and Schiller's "Ode to Joy" into an

"Ode to Good Taste." So it was interesting to listen to these two chew over moral questions I had sometimes been forced to grapple with in my line of work, and to hear them come down, if not as close to Satan as Timmy sometimes thought I belonged, then closer than either one of them might have admitted if described in those terms.

Uncertain that we would want to make a meal of Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese-Thad said, "I didn't come prepared to comb my lunch"-we stopped in Great Bar-rington at the Union Bar and Grill for salad and Cuban pork sandwiches. This inviting local landmark, with its metal sculptures and SoHo-in-the-hills brushed-aluminum interior, was packed with weekenders from the city. Some were in the Berkshires to have their souls filled up with art, theater, music and dance. Others, less transported by the offerings of the Boston Symphony Orchestra or the dancers at Jacob's Pillow, at least were getting their cultural tickets punched.

After lunch, en route east over the hills on winding, woodsy Route 23, Timmy, Thad and I worked out a plan. The chances were good that even after an event-filled twenty years, Kurt Zinsser would recognize me. So rather than spook him, we decided Timmy and Thad would engage Zinsser and keep him occupied while I looked around the farm. Then I would move in for a confrontation based on what I did or didn't discover.

The Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese Web site had provided us with directions and informed us that visitors to the farm were welcome. That made it less likely, we figured, that Leo Moyle was being held captive in the main farmhouse or cheese factory, but was probably somewhere nearby.

In the center of the village of Monterey, we turned down a country road just past the general store, where about half the cars parked out front had Massachusetts plates and the rest were Volvos and Saabs from New York and Connecticut. The narrow road followed a meandering brook through stands of maple, hickory and birch, and meadows where cows and sheep once had grazed.

Few of the farms were working now, however, and instead of John Deere and International Harvester machines outside the barns, there were sleek sedans from Germany and Sweden, and Detroit SUVs the size of Soviet troop carriers for hauling the peasant bread and radicchio out from Great Barrington. The white clapboard farmhouses were beautifully kept, and many of the barns, also bright white, were now garages or guest houses with skylights and discreetly placed satellite dishes.

We passed the farm that produces renowned Monterey chevre -in a pasture several goats frolicked for our amusement-and then we drove on for another mile or two until we spotted a herd of llamas in a field. Then came the farmhouse and a large, faded, red barn nearby, with a sign on a post that read: Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese, the Spirit of the Ancient Incas in a New England Country Setting.

Diefendorfer said, "It's like Grandma Moses at Machu Picchu. It's a little confusing."

Timmy asked, "Didn't you get a lot of this kind of cultural fusion-or at least weird commercial exploitation-in Lancaster County? Chain-hotel cocktail lounges with Pennsylvania Dutch happy hours, and so on?"

"We did. One of my favorites was a hex-sign extermination service. I once heard about a brothel over in Bucks County where for eighty-five dollars a dominatrix in an Amish farmwife's garb would raise welts on customers' bare backs with a buggy whip.

But I don't know if that story was true. Pennsylvania has never had much tolerance for commercialized sin. Historically, it's one reason New Jersey exists."

"Demand and supply," Timmy mused.

"Yes," Diefendorfer said, "the Bible should have included a book called Market Forces, with special verses commenting on New Jersey."

We pulled into the Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese parking area and stopped under a big spreading oak. Bees buzzed and flies zigzagged through the thick air, and the place smelled of warm green growth. A sign directed visitors to the barn, so Timmy and Diefendorfer headed over there in search of Kurt Zinsser while I ambled over to the wire fence to look at the llamas. A mud-spattered Chevy Blazer with Massachusetts plates was parked next to the barn, and closer to the house was a newer, cleaner Chevy 4x4 pickup. There were just the two buildings, close to the road and not far from each other, and it now seemed to me unlikely that Leo Moyle would be held captive in so public a place. Traffic on this rural lane was light, but the location didn't feel isolated enough for the safety and security serious kidnappers would need.

I watched Timmy and Diefendorfer disappear into the visitors' entrance to the barn, then turned back toward the dozen or so llamas. The two nearest peered my way while the others continued to graze. With their big soft eyes and alert pointed ears, the llamas looked like friendly storybook animals, maybe from A. A. Milne. I half expected them to be holding toy buckets and shovels, or even to speak: "Pleasant day, amigo."

Unsure of what to do next-approaching the farmhouse made no sense-I was about to join Timmy and Diefendorfer in the barn, when the screen door to the farmhouse opened and a stout, middle-aged man clomped across the porch and down the steps.

His head was shaved, and he wore jeans, work boots and a sweat-stained T-shirt.

The shirt had a picture of a llama on the front, and the lower half of the animal, stretched across the man's ample belly, was distorted, as if the llama had been blown up like a balloon.

I didn't recognize him at first, but Kurt Zinsser looked my way and did a double take.

"Denver?" he said, coming over to me. "Nineteen– what? Seventy-nine? Eighty?"

"I'm not sure," I said, struggling to look blank. "I've only been to Denver once. It was around that time that I was there, as I recall. Wait a minute. You're not… uh… uh?"

"Kurt Zinsser. And you're a private investigator. Bill Straithwaite?"

"Don Strachey. I didn't recognize you at first. You had a big, bushy beard back then, like Alexander Pushkin or the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi."

Cordial enough and definitely curious at first, Zinsser now began to look suspicious.

"What are you doing here? Are you looking for me?"

"No, I'm with some friends, just poking around the Berkshires. Is this your farm? Are you the Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese tycoon?"

Zinsser glanced toward the barn, noted Timmy's Honda, and said, "I'm on my way into Barrington. Sorry I can't show you around. But Darren's in the shop and he can help you out. Have you had our cheese?"

"Not yet. I'm looking forward to trying it. It's unusual."

"I learned to make it from an old woman I met in Cuzco. That's where I went after I left Denver in eighty-five. I heard it was going to be the high-tech center of the Andes, which turned out to be not quite true. But I found my health there, physical and spiritual."

"And your livelihood. I hear Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese is catching on."

"You'll understand why once you've tried it. Eat it every day for a month and you'll be a different person."

Since Thad Diefendorfer was not present, I asked the question I knew he would ask.

"Why would I want to be a different person?"

Zinsser smiled a smile that I guessed he thought of as enigmatic. He said, "If you have to ask, you may never find out. But read my chapbook-you can pick one up in the visitors' center-and perhaps then you'll begin to understand what I learned in the mountains. And if you choose not to open yourself up to the wholeness of being, it's no skin off my ass."

I said, "I heard Billy Blount has done some traveling, too. Someone in Albany told me recently that he's in Singapore. Are you two still in touch?"

I could see the lightbulb go on inside Zinsser's head, and he looked at me hard. "Are you part of the investigation?" he said.

"Which investigation?"

"The investigation of Leo Moyle's kidnapping."

"I might be."

Zinsser snorted. "What horseshit. What a lying sack of bull puke you are, Strachey.

Good Christ Almighty!" Zinsser shook his head, which glistened with sweat in the afternoon sun. His more spiritual self was not in the ascendancy.

"Are you a Jay Plankton fan?" I asked.

"You're friggin' right I am."

"You talk like him."

"I'm flattered."

"Aren't you gay anymore? Have you become one of those ex-gays?"

"No, but I no longer parade myself around the American landscape wearing a big sign that says Victim. Instead of whining about how oppressed I am, I lead a life of dignified self-sufficiency."

"If you're a Plankton fan," I said, "you must have as much wool in your brain as you've got in your teeth. His loathing for you and me and other gay people is vast and unadulterated. Plankton could care less if you've turned into some kind of neoconservative twit. To him, to be gay is contemptible. And you still admire him?"

Zinsser, the former Marxist, SDSer, FFFer, et cetera, sniffed and said, "Plankton is not antigay; he is anti-politically correct. That's something the J-Bird and I very much have in common."

"Cut the crap, Zinsser. Eight times out of ten, people who use that term are bigots and creeps. Anti-PCism is the current last refuge of the incorrigibly narrow and mean-spirited. So, is the FFF just more political correctness run amok? Is that what it was when you were part of it in the seventies?"

"I am neither ashamed of nor embarrassed by my years in the FFF. But if that's why you're here-which appears to be the case-let me assure you I have had no association whatsoever with the Forces of Free Faggotry since 1977. And I know for a fact that the organization fell apart soon after I left it. These people who are hassling Plankton and who kidnapped Leo Moyle are not FFFers. I am certain of that because whatever we were, we were never violent and we were never childish."

I looked at him helplessly. This was not the Kurt Zinsser I was hoping or expecting to find. After a moment, I said, "You've done quite a one-eighty over the last twenty years, Zinsser."

Looking smug, he said, "Oh, I have at that."

"Do you remember Thad Diefendorfer?"

"Sure, the Mennonite-farmboy-turned-cat-burglar. I once had a crush on him for about ten minutes. But he was joined at the hip at the time to Sammy Day, another member of the organization. Why do you ask?"

"He's over in the barn."

"Thad is? What's he doing here, with you?"

"We're looking for Leo Moyle. Thad wants to help clear the FFF's good name, and I'm working for… a client."

"Which client? Who is it?"

"My client prefers to retain his privacy."

Zinsser's eyes got bright. "It's Jay Plankton, isn't it? You're accepting the filthy lucre of this man you malign behind his back. Ha! I love it!"

"I malign Plankton to his face, and he maligns me right back. You've heard his show.

You know how these J-Bird people communicate with one another."

"Trading insults is how certain types of heterosexual men show affection for one another," Zinsser said. "Many gay men do too, in their own way. But you really mean it.

You hate your employer. What a duplicitous asshole you are."

"Actually, Plankton's not too crazy about me either, and says so sincerely. In any case, I've taken the job mainly as a favor to an old acquaintance, a New York City cop who once saved my life. He thinks my contacts with the old FFF might help me sort out this current thing."

Zinsser laughed. "And so you've come over here thinking I might have Leo Moyle trussed up in a dungeon behind my root cellar. Is that it?"

"You were not selected as a suspect randomly, Zinsser. The neo-FFFers, as you may know, have been harassing Jay Plankton for several weeks with insults and rude items sent to him through the mail. One of the substances, labeled 'excrement for the execrable,' has been identified under scientific analysis as llama shit. Any idea where it might have come from? I'm sure your supply here is ample."

He hesitated just perceptibly as something seemed to go through his mind. Then he said quickly, "If that's somebody's idea of advancing the cause of gay rights, it sounds ineffective to me. I can certainly assure you I had nothing to do with anything so juvenile, and so perfectly lame. As I said, I've got to be in Great Barrington in twenty minutes. But you're welcome to scour the premises here in search of Leo Moyle bound and gagged, if that's what you've come all this way for. Feel free to turn the place inside out."

"Thanks. I would like to look around. Eliminate you as a suspect or whatever."

Zinsser checked his watch. "Darren can show you around. Darren's my partner.

Although, he can't leave the visitors' center for long. People show up and want to see the operation and sample the product."

"Do visitors always take to your cheese immediately, or does eating it require some getting used to?"

"Nearly all our visitors," Zinsser said with a look of satisfaction, "are longtime customers before they arrive. For many of them, coming here is a kind of pilgrimage."

"And the Berkshires, luckily, are more convenient than the Andes."

"I should say hello to Thad," Zinsser said, quickly backing away now toward his pickup truck. "But I'm going to be late for a meeting if I don't get moving. Tell Thad I'm sorry I missed him. What's he doing now, anyway?"

"Farming. In central New Jersey."

"That sounds wholesome enough," Zinsser said, climbing into his truck. "He's not raising llamas, is he?"

"No, mostly eggplants."

"Ah, is moussaka an Amish dish?" Zinsser said. "Who would have guessed." He waved once and drove off fast.

Chapter 13

Timmy said, "We're onto something here."

"You bet we are," Thad added.

"We are?"

No sooner had Zinsser departed than Timmy and Thad emerged from the barn picking hair out of their teeth. As we spoke, they repeatedly spit into Zinsser's parking lot, which I now noticed was strewn with tiny strands of gnarled wool.

"Zinsser's boyfriend Darren, who's in there reading an ancient Incan text while he's minding the cash register," Timmy said, "gave us the lowdown on three kids who work for Zinsser during the week making cheese."

"They're trouble," Thad said, "and Zinsser is actually meeting a couple of other guys in Great Barrington right now that he wants to hire to replace these kids he doesn't get along with."

"These three," Timmy went on, "are young and gay and angry and out of control, according to Darren. And, not only do they have constant personality and ideological clashes with Zinsser, recently they fought over which radio station to have on in the cheese-making room during the morning. The kids want WRPI for the music they like and the Pacifica news. Zinsser is always present to supervise– apparently getting the wool-to-cheese blend just right can be tricky-and he insists that the radio be tuned into… guess who?"

"Interesting."

"And so," Thad said, "there's this constant tension in the morning, with the kids their names are Charm, Pheromone and Edward-mocking and berating Jay Plankton all the time, and Zinsser refusing to change the station."

"Why haven't the kids quit? Or why hasn't Zinsser replaced them sooner?" I asked.

Timmy said, "They live up the road in Charm's father's house. He's one of Zinsser's financial backers. The father's in Provence for the summer with his new wife. But Charm can only live there and have her checking account replenished periodically if she's willing to work for Zinsser. She had academic and drug problems, and this is part of her rehab program. Zinsser has to keep her around-and where Charm goes, Pheromone and Edward go too-so he's canning the Mexican illegals who now do the field and barn chores, Darren says, and Zinsser's getting the three young people out into the open air where he won't have to listen to them dis the J-Bird all morning long."

I thought it over and said, "None of this is what I expected to find here." I described to Timmy and Thad my encounter with Kurt Zinsser, angry neolefty turned angry neocon.

"Unless his devotion to Jay Plankton is all a cunning pose, which I don't think it is, Zinsser is as unlikely a harasser of Plankton or kidnapper of Leo Moyle as we're likely to come across. These kids do sound like better bets, sort of. Certainly they would have access to llama droppings. And if they couldn't stand Zinsser and wanted to mess with his mind and get away with it, they could go after his hero, the J-Bird. Except, of course, they're… kids. Three young students in rural Massachusetts who stage a kidnapping in New York? I don't know about that."

"But," Timmy said, "we haven't met them. Darren says they're pretty out of control.

Especially Charm Stankewitz. And they know about Zinsser and the old FFE He told them all about it, apparently hoping to show how cool he once was."

"Are Charm, Pheromone and Edward their real names?"

Thad casually spat something ugly into the dust and said, "Charm's real name is Patricia Stankewitz, and Edward's is Edward Nicetwink. It had been Edward Beers, but he had it legally changed last winter when he hit eighteen and his parents in Stockbridge couldn't stop him. Pheromone's actual name, believe it or not, is Pheromone Peabody."

"An old New England Yankee family via the sixties, it sounds like," Timmy said.

"And what about Darren, your source for all this data?" I asked. "I take it Darren strikes you as a reliable source of information."

"He's got no axe to grind that's evident," Timmy said. "He's Zinsser's boyfriend, and that's clearly where his sympathies lie. But his story of these three troubled youths is plausible enough."

"Why don't you go in and meet Darren?" Thad said. "He'll give you a free sample of Woolly Llama Cheese."

Timmy said, "Yes, you haven't had any yet."

"Is it pretty awful?"

"Of course," they said, nearly in unison.

"Lead the way."

Darren, a slender, sloe-eyed man a good twenty years Zinsser's junior, was wearing a llama T-shirt like his partner's. He had a small llama tattoo on one upper arm, and on the other upper arm were tattooed the words "Robert Forever," apparent evidence of the hazards of subdermal body decoration.

At my request, Darren reiterated what he had told Timmy and Thad about Charm, Pheromone and Edward. He had nothing new to add, although when I asked him directly whether he thought these three schoolkidsPheromone was only seventeen, and Edward and Charm just a year older-were capable of pulling off a kidnapping, Darren said, "Nothing those brats did would surprise me. They are totally unpredictable, and I've always thought truly dangerous."