Текст книги "Tongue tied"

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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"No."

"It doesn't look like anybody's been held captive here, either."

"Uh-uh."

"This all looks unpromising, Lyle."

"They could still be involved. They could have Plankton out on the Island somewhere. Anyway, Strachey, have you got any better ideas?"

"No, I don't. But so what? You had me a little worried there for a while, Lyle, but there is absolutely nothing in this apartment to suggest that Day or Diefendorfer or the other guy are involved in the kidnapping, or the neo-FFF-anything-else of a criminal nature. And that stuff Leo Moyle said about his captors calling him a sinner and an unrighteous man-maybe it's some Jerry Falwell type we should be looking for. Anyway, my guess at this point is that there's an innocent explanation for Thad meeting up with his old FFF boyfriend and not telling me about it. But it's late, and I'm not about to hang around here and find out tonight. Thad has the number of where I 'l l be staying, at a friend's place on West Seventy-seventh Street, and I'll leave a note here asking him to call me in the morning. Then we'll know."

Barner gave me a look that I guessed was meant to be incredulous, but it looked forced. He was letting his biases fill the void of no evidence, and I guessed he knew it.

"I'm hoping I'll know what the story is well before morning," Barner said. "I'm going to wait around here until they come back. If they do."

"Good luck."

"You can take the train back to Manhattan. You can get the L at the Lorimer Street station."

"Fine."

The female cop came into the apartment and said, "The pickup's still there. They didn't take it."

Barner screwed up his face, as if this news might indicate something treacherous.

"Keep the truck under surveillance," he said. "I'm going to look around here some more."

Melendez the super was in the doorway and stood aside as the young cop went out.

He said to Barner, "You gonna stay in the apartment?"

"Yeah. I'll take responsibility."

Melendez looked doubtful. "The radio guy isn't up here."

"Not at the moment," Barner said, making clear with his look that that was the end of that discussion.

The super stood for a moment longer, then turned and went out.

I said, "Isn't what you're doing illegal, Lyle? There's no life-or-death question now."

"You don't know that. You don't know that at all. Plankton is being held by some very rough people who have vowed to hurt him. So, is there a life-or-death issue? I'd say there is."

"In Sam Day's apartment? Where's the evidence?"

Barner closed his eyes, then opened them. "Strachey, do I have to explain this to you, of all people? You know, when you've been doing this as long as I have, you get a feel for these things."

"You're full of it, Lyle," I said, "and you know it, too." I gave him the number of where I'd be staying, wrote out a note asking Thad to call me no matter what time it was, and left Barner fiddling around with a bookshelf, as if it might slide away revealing a secret passageway.

I went out into the wet night air. It was after midnight, and yet the Brooklyn streets were teeming: couples of all ages, mostly straight; young Spanish guys in threes; club kids just heading out; entire large Latino extended families ambling home after some get-together in a restaurant or a relative's apartment. It occurred to me that this echt-urban scene was at least superficially the antithesis of Lancaster County Amish life, and I wondered what Thad and Sam Day, or Dazenfeffer, made of it.

On the platform of the Lorimer L-train station, I waited with a mostly young crowd that was sparse at first, then seemed to grow exponentially. When the Manhattan-bound train finally pulled in four or five minutes later, a Tokyo-sized mob stuffed itself into the six or eight cars. I boarded the final car, where it felt like a party was already under way. The guys were cool in their tight pants and shirts, and the young women were simultaneously glammed up and glammed down in their makeup and party dresses and gray sneakers. It was Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth headed for Giro's and the Mocambo in sensible shoes. It was no life I had ever known-I had gone almost directly from New Brunswick to Saigon-and it all felt vaguely alien. Yet the unostentatious ease with which these happy kids cast off for a night of partying in the center of the known universe– i.e., the slice of Manhattan bordered by Fourteenth Street on the north and Canal Street on the south-made them seem neither unduly privileged nor in any way depraved. They seemed both wholesome and lucky to be living in America at the pinnacle of its most recent age of innocence.

I was relaxing for a moment and enjoying watching the kids on the party car when my attention was suddenly riveted on the platform across the way. A Canarsie-bound train had just pulled out ahead of ours, and as our train to Manhattan lurched and picked up speed, I was amazed to see a familiar figure hurrying toward the stairs of the Lorimer Street exit. What was Charm Stankewitz doing in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, in old-FFFer Sam Day's neighborhood?

Reminding myself that Brooklyn was a big place and a lot of people went there for many reasons, I nonetheless exited the train at Bedford Avenue, crossed to the opposite platform, and boarded the next train back to Lorimer. Making my way quickly back to Sam Day's apartment, I watched for Charm on the busy streets, but I didn't spot her. In the subway station, she had been wearing an orange tank top and a red skirt.

Slight as she was, I was sure she would stand out in a crowd in that getup. But ten or twelve minutes had gone by, and Charm was nowhere to be seen on Lorimer Street.

The chubby young male cop was standing in the doorway to Sam Day's building. "Is Detective Barner still up there?" I asked.

"Yeah, go on up."

"I don't need to. Did a young woman go in who was wearing a red skirt and skimpy orange top?"

"No, nobody went in."

"Did you notice a young woman fitting that description stop here at all, or just go by?"

The cop thought about this. "Not that I noticed."

"Thanks."

I walked to the end of the block, peered around, then backtracked to the subway. I waited for a time at the top of the station stairs on Lorimer, hoping I might spot Charm, or Thad and his companions. Or-though I could make no sense of this one-all of them together. But I saw no familiar faces at all, and after several minutes I descended into the overheated tunnel and rejoined the Manhattan-bound stream of party-goers.

During the ride, I struggled to recall Kurt Zinsser's boyfriend Darren's description of Charm's Brooklyn friends that Darren said she visited once a week. There had been no last names given, just one first name, a second first name-Sharon?-and, more memorably, somebody referred to as Strawberry Swirl. I figured I could find a phone book, but it seemed unlikely that I would come upon a listing for "Swirl, S." and a Brooklyn street address.

My ears popped as the train hurtled westward under the East River, and I thought of Leo Moyle's underground transits, one going and one coming back, during his twenty-four hours of captivity. His ears had popped too, he had told Barner, indicating transit via tunnel to Brooklyn, Queens, or New Jersey. Who among all the people I knew with FFF connections were bridge-and-tunnel people? Just Sam Day, plus Charm's Brooklyn friends. Simple coincidence? Could be. Lots of Manhattan-loving nonrich young people actually lived in the once hopelessly unfashionable outer boroughs now. And no connections between any of the assorted known FFF cast of characters made any sense I could begin to imagine. I was missing something, or just way off the beam. Beam me up, Thaddie, I thought-if, unlikely as it seemed, Thad really did know more than he was telling me-Thaddie, beam me up.

I got off the train at the Fourteenth Street-Seventh Avenue station and made my way along the pedestrian tunnel to the platform for the 1 and 9 trains heading up the West Side. This Manhattan station was even hotter than the Brooklyn stations, and it stank of something, too– something pungent that was both off-putting and at the same time had vaguely pleasant associations.

What was it? Not diesel fumes. Years earlier, when I quit smoking, I had loved standing behind buses as they pulled away and sucking up the carbon monoxide fumes they belched into city streets. It was both sickening and at the same time the source of a swell little high of a type I had lost forever.

The stench on the 1 and 9 platform was like that, but both sharper and more indoorsy. What was it? It smelled somewhat medicinal, a bit like cleaning fluid. Oven cleaner? This was Timmy's household-chore-cum-martyrdom, and I knew the smell only from distant corners of our Albany house.

I turned to the bench that was behind me against the station's old worn tile wall, and the odor was even stronger back there. I noticed a small pool of fluid on the wooden bench and an open vial on its side. A popper, that's what it was, that must have fallen out of someone's pocket or backpack. Amyl nitrite-heart medicine originally, and in recent decades a drug inhaled by some gay men, like Lyle Barner's friend Dave and his buddies, to heighten sexual excitement. It hit me that poppers smelled not just hospitallike but also a lot like-where had I just heard someone complaining about the smell?-nail polish.

Chapter 19

It was almost 1:30 by the time I climbed the stairs to Broadway and Seventy-ninth into a steady warm rain shower. It hadn't been raining in Brooklyn, but meteorologically New York was a vast continent, and I had moved underground from the Cote d'lvoire to Ethiopia.

Rainwear or an umbrella would have been nice, but haste was going to have to do.

Where were the Bumber-shoot people when you needed them most? Whenever Timmy and I had visited European cities in warm weather-Amsterdam, Paris, Florence-we had marveled at the way in which, whenever rain began to fall, tall Africans suddenly materialized selling umbrellas. We had concluded that the umbrella merchants were all members of a West African tribe called the Bumbershoot people. But either the Bumbershoots had not yet made it to New York, or Giuliani had had them all rounded up and shipped back to Europe.

Most of the Upper West Side coffee shops and Chinese and Greek restaurants were shut down by now, but the bars were still open, and there were still plenty of people on Broadway hurrying home or to whatever or whoever was next on their Saturday night dance cards. Just below Seventy-seventh, Big Nick's burger joint, open twenty-four hours, was lively, with people at tables out on the sidewalk under the scaffolding of a building that had been under renovation since early in the Abe Beame administration.

I found an open newsstand and picked up an early-edition Sunday Times, a News and a Post. Plankton's kidnapping was front-page but below the fold in the Times – Jay Plankton Abducted Outside Apartment -and full-page on the fronts of both the News -

Plankton Kidnapped -and the Post – Gay Radicals Snatch J-Bird.

I seated myself at a scuffed plastic table under the scaffolding at Nick's, the Upper West Side version of a cafe on the Champs-Elysees, and ordered black coffee from the harried middle-aged waitress, who looked Cambodian. I ordered the coffee because I had realized back on the platform of the Fourteenth and Seventh subway station that I was going to be up for a while, probably all night and into the next day. I wanted a shower first, and to make some phone calls, but I expected to be back in Brooklyn before the night was through, and then even farther out on Long Island.

While I worked at Nick's coffee, I read the news accounts of the two kidnappings and of Leo Moyle's release. Both the News and the Post had front-paged the "I V Ricky Martin" and "Kiss Me, Elton" tattoo pix, while the Times had chosen to forgo the lurid graphics and let a file photo of Plankton suffice. In the picture he looked far from wholesome, not a figure any self-respecting kidnapper would want to lay hands on, it seemed to me.

The stories on the abductions and Moyle's release were straightforward accounts from police sources and from those few eyewitnesses to the events Saturday afternoon outside the J-Bird's apartment. The FFF figured in all the stories, but the police said they could not be sure that the few vague but ominous communications they had received from the supposed kidnappers were legitimate.

Leo Moyle, all three papers said, remained under police protection in his East Side apartment and had not made himself available to reporters. Jerry Jeris, speaking for Moyle, said that Moyle had weathered his captivity "as well as could be expected," that he was praying for the safe release of his friend, and that he would be filling in for the J-Bird on his show, starting Monday at

6 AM.

The rain was coming down steadier now, but I needed to get moving. Using the bulky classified section of the Times as an umbrella, I headed west on Seventy-seventh and let myself into one of the older, well-kept brick apartment buildings interspersed among the brownstones on the leafy block just east of Riverside. Two friends, Susan and Liza, who lived in the building, let me keep not only a set of spare keys but a toothbrush and a change of clothes in a closet near their foldout couch.

Susan and Liza designed outdoor display lighting for tall buildings, and they were frequently in Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur. In New York, one of their jobs was choosing and installing the colored lights used on special occasions in the tower atop the Empire State Building. Both were in Salisbury, Connecticut, for two weeks, lighting a new Indian casino's full-scale replica of a Las Vegas reduced-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower-the developer had made it clear that he didn't want the Parisian tower, but

"the Vegas one"-so I had the apartment to myself.

It was just before two when I undressed, turned on the shower, and switched on the radio in the bathroom to the WINS all-news station. The traffic and weather reports had shifted to "moderate" and "warm with showers," and the J-Bird report had changed too, but not for the better.

The news announcer said, "Police have stepped up their efforts to locate Jay Plankton, the talk-radio personality who was abducted Saturday afternoon. Rescuing Plankton turned even more urgent tonight when a package was dropped off at the newsroom of the New York Post. Inside the package was a note and an object in a refrigerator bag. The note claimed that the object was Jay Plankton's tongue.

"The note also said that since Plankton had convinced the kidnappers that he could never be 'reeducated,' in their words, he would have to pay an even heavier price. The next piece of Plankton to be sent out would be 'an even more important part of him,' the note said. It was signed by the FFF, or Forces of Free Faggotry, the radical gay group that had been harassing Plankton.

"Police were not certain that the package was sent by the real kidnappers, or if the object inside was an actual human tongue. The package and its contents are being ana-lyzed, a police spokesman said, and NYPD is taking the threat very seriously."

Next was an update on negotiations over an upcoming Bush-Gore debate, but I didn't hang around to listen to it. I postponed the shower, dressed again, found Barner's cellphone number, sat at Susan and Liza's desk, and dialed.

"Barner."

"It's Strachey. I heard."

"This is bad."

"Does it look legit?"

"They think so at the precinct. The tongue thing's at the lab."

"Are you still in Brooklyn?"

"For now. The assholes aren't back yet. I'd have every cop on Long Island looking for them if I knew what they were driving. Diefendorfer's truck is still here, and no vehicle is registered to a Samuel Day in the state of New York."

I said, "I'm coming back out there. I think I know who's got Plankton. It's not Day or Thad or any of them."

"Oh yeah? Then who is it?"

"Lyle, you don't want to know."

"Gotcha. I do but I don't."

"It's Dave."

"Dave who?" It was as if he hadn't heard me.

"Dave Welch, your beau."

"That's bullshit." But he hesitated just perceptibly before he said it.

"I'll explain when I get out there. I'm coming out. Can you get me a ride?"

There was a silence, and then Barner said, "Have you had a couple of drinks, or what?"

"No, just get me over to Williamsburg, and you'll see."

"You're crazy, Strachey. You're nuts."

"Uh-uh. I can explain it. You're smitten with this guy, but you're smarter than you are smitten, and you'll get it. You're not always a smart gay man, Lyle, but you're a smart cop, and that's the Lyle Barner who will see it right away."

"This is nuts. You're nuts."

"Can you send a patrol car for me? I'm on the Upper West Side." I gave him the address.

He said, "No."

"No what? You won't even get me a ride?"

"Nah. Uh-uh."

"What if they saw Plankton's dick off? It looks like that's where these dementos are headed next. Do Dave and his pals get high? What do they use? They couldn't be com-miting atrocities like this stone cold sober. What all do you know about Dave Welch that you haven't told me, Lyle?"

The line went dead. Barner had hung up.

Chapter 20

I caught a cab at Broadway and Seventy-second, and the cabbie, Ahmed something, was willing to take me to Brooklyn. We sped crosstown toward the FDR and the East River bridges. The cab's suspension seemed to fall out at Seventy-second and Third, but Ahmed exhibited no concern over what had happened, so neither did I.

I brought along the cellphone I kept stashed at Susan and Liza's. I had another one I kept in my desk drawer in Albany, and a couple of others in strategic locations. I did not like the things. Nobody who carried them around had enough privacy. You couldn't just bask in your immediate natural surroundings without fear of interruption from afar, or have any kind of uninterfered-with interior life.

Timmy considered my "cellphone phobia" both neurotic and impractical for anyone in my line of work, and I had to agree with him on the last point. Also, as he had explained to me more than once, you can just shut the damn things off. Nor was it required of cellphone owners that they make blabby spectacles of themselves in public places like restaurants, airports and trains. You could own one and still use it considerately.

Logic was on Timmy's side, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I was transmittered– and antenna-ed up, if not 24/7/365, then maybe 18/5/312. Still irrationally, sentimentally, uselessly-I longed for a return to the days when public telephones were black things hung inside stand-up boxes with doors that accordioned shut and that reeked of stale cigarette smoke and Audrey Tbtter's perfume. And, like Marlowe in The Big Sleep, you could pop a nickel in a slot and turn a rotary dial. And then while you waited for whatever bad news or treachery was at the other end of the line, you could sooth your apprehensions by listening to a series of exquisite, subtly mechanical clicks followed by a string of perfectly rolled Rs that could have been created by the tongue of a Catalonian countess or a sloe-eyed bullfighter.

I brought the cellphone along, even switched it on. Not that I was likely to divulge the number to anyone but Lyle and risk having the thing start twittering next to my pancreas. Of course I would give Thad the number, once I was satisfied, as I was sure I soon would be, that he was not a liar and a kidnapper and a seriously unrighteous, duplicitous Mennonite.

Traffic was lighter than it had been earlier, but even at a quarter to three in the morning the city's main roads felt like workday rush hour in Milan. New York was not just a city that never slept; its nighttime existence constituted a kind of parallel universe to its regular-hours self, and being in that New York night world always felt to me like exciting world travel, like going to Barcelona or Cairo.

The cab rolled up to the Lorimer Street apartment at 3:10 AM. The street was much quieter now, with no sign of the cops who had been watching the building earlier, or of their patrol car. The rain had let up, and the air was fresher in the lungs than it had been, with just an undertone of steamed asphalt and the variegated human smells of the city.

I paid the cabbie, and was turning toward the building when three young people came up the street. One of them said to me in a sarcastic tone, "Hi, schmuck."

"Hey, Charm, it's you. Did you escape from Sing-Sing?"

"I'm not in Sing-Sing yet-no thanks to you, asshole."

"What brings you to Brooklyn, Charm? Are you making a woolly cheese delivery to the Williamsburg Incas?"

As her two companions, one male and one female, stood at attention on either side of her glaring at me, Charm snapped, "I'm lucky to be here at all, what with you siccing the staties on me. They told me not to leave Massachusetts, as a matter of fact, but I talked to my dad's lawyer, Graham Witherspoon in Great Barrington, and he says nobody can connect me with any kidnapping, and I haven't been charged with anything, and those goons can ask me to do what they want me to do, but they can't tell me what to do."

"Uh-huh. But don't you want to be helpful, Charm? The cops just want to find the kidnappers and make sure Jay Plankton is freed before he is maimed any more than he already has been, or even killed."

"What do you mean, maimed?"

She evidently had not heard the news. So I explained about the tongue that had been dropped off earlier at the Post. "Or," I asked, "did you send the tongue, and this is another one of your bad-taste stunts in the name of the FFF?"

Charm made a face, and shot back, "Bad taste is only bad taste, so don't start in on that shit with me. Bad taste is in no way comparable to injury or murder. Name one major religion or secular philosophical or ethical construct where taste and morality intersect in any important way. You can't, can you?"

"Oh, Charm, Charm-I think you were not raised Presbyterian."

"No, but I've studied Calvinism, and I think I know the difference between predestination and simple, ephemeral notions of fashion and propriety." Charm's friends, her characteristic claque of two, gazed at her with awe.

"So, are you going in?" I asked, indicating the entrance to Sam Day's building.

"No, why should I go in there?"

"You don't know anyone who lives in here?"

"No, and anyhow we're not going in anywhere, we're going out."

Charm introduced me to her friends, Louis Murphy and Strawberry Swirl, who lived nearby, and said they were going over to North Sixth Street to the Pussy Pound.

Strawberry Swirl, it turned out, was female-lithe and catlike, with no hint of an out-of-control Sealtest-ice-cream habit, despite her name-but Louis was a hulking male and an unlikely habitue of the venue named. Although, I guessed, maybe selected male aficionados were let in too.

I was about to make careful inquiries about what an evening at the Pussy Pound might consist of, and to try to determine if, as it appeared, Charm's showing up on Lorimer Street was coincidental with Sam Day's living there. But before I could do either, Thad Diefendorfer came down the street with two other men.

"Don! Hey, it's you!" Thad recognized me but didn't seem to know Charm, Louis or Strawberry Swirl, and they showed no sign of recognizing Thad or the men on either side of him. "What are you doing out here?" Thad asked. He was holding a long-handled shovel with a sharp, narrow blade.

"I was hoping to talk to you," I said. "I was here earlier, but I guess you were out… what? Practicing a little urban agriculture?"

"Yes," Thad said, "we were over at the Bush wick Community Garden weeding the arugula and watering the tomatoes. The guys both work til ten o'clock, and anyway they like to garden when it's quiet and cool. Don, 1 want you to meet two friends. This is Daryl Kemmercr, an old friend from Ephrata, and Sam Day. I think I mentioned Sam, my main squeeze back in my FFF days. Now Sam and Daryl are together.

Amazing, isn't it? Or not so amazing, really, since Sam was always turned on by simple Amish boys, and there are only a certain number of us available outside of Lancaster County."

There were introductions all around, including Charm, Louis and Strawberry.

"Are you Charm from the cheese farm?" Day asked. He was tall and bearded and wore a sweaty T-shirt with a picture on it of what looked like a head of cabbage.

Kemmerer, similarly clad, was lankier, like Thad, with the same big ears that stuck out, chin whiskers, a formidable Adam's apple, and wavy locks that came down the back of his neck.

Charm said, "It looks like I'm famous-Charm from the cheese farm. Cheesy Charm.

Oh, right." She gave me the evil eye.

"Well, you sure did a good job of making the FFF look bad," Day said. "Aren't you the one who sent Plankton all the threats and that other weird stuff?"

"The FFF did an awful lot of really good work in its early days," Thad added. "It's really a shame, Charm, that your impression of the organization came strictly from Kurt Zinsser. Kurt was always prickly and a bit uppity, and he doesn't appear to have improved in either regard."

Charm chose not to reply to any of this. She just looked at Day and said, "I've heard of rice queens, and I've heard of dinge queens. And I've heard of snow queens for the dinge queens. But I've never before run into gay men who go for Amish guys. What do you call yourself, Sam, a clip-clop queen? Do you have to worry about getting into masochistic relationships where you start to feel buggy-whipped? Or is that what you're looking for?"

"No," Day said cheerfully. "The two Amish men in my life have been in no way abusive. They've been rational, sweet-natured, gentle and very comfortably masculine."

"Oh, swell, congratulations," Charm said. "And now you're having this rational, gentle, masculine, wild threesome. Can we all come up and watch?"

Kemmerer blushed, Day smiled, and Thad just shook his head. There was a part of me that wanted to compliment Charm on the first intriguing suggestion, however unrealistic it was, that I had ever heard her make. Instead, I said, "I was hoping you'd invite us along to go dancing, or whatever, at the Pussy Pound, Charm."

"Don't you wish," she said, then had to laugh, and the rest of us did, too.

Thad said to me, "How did you find me out here, anyway? Did I tell you where I was staying?"

"No," I said, "but why don't we go on inside, and all that will soon become clear."

"I hope you don't mind if we don't join you," Charm said. "Sitting around with four middle-aged male homosexuals is not my idea of Saturday night in New York."

We all made it clear that Charm, Louis and Strawberry Swirl would incur no social penalty by moving on, which they soon did.

"So," Thad said, "Charm and her gang are in the all-clear?"

"I'd say so, yes-that is, if they aren't out here conspiring with you three in the kidnappings of Moyle and Plankton."

"Conspiring with us?" Kemmerer said, looking bewildered.

"Where would anybody get that idea?" Day said.

Thad smiled wanly and said to me, "Lylc Marncr?"

I nodded. "He's inside, in Sam's apartment. I Ic's going to ask you a lot of stupid questions, which you're probably going to have to answer."

"Lyle Barner, the cop?" Day said, "lie's in my apartment?"

"The super let him in. Don't be too hard on the guy. Lyle made it look legal. Hard to resist, anyway."

I explained to the three of them that Barner had had Thad followed to Brooklyn from Albany, based on nothing more than Thad's FFF history and an irrational antipathy fed by baseless sexual jealousy. And that when Barner discovered that Sam Day, another old FFFer, was the listed tenant of the apartment Thad was visiting, this-plus some as yet unexplained peculiar language that one of the kidnappers used-was all Barner needed to send the kidnapping investigation wackily Thad's way.

"And then," I said, "when he heard you'd left the apartment with a shovel, it seemed to confirm Lyle's worst suspicions."

"Suspicions ofwrtat?" Day asked. "Agriculture?"

"It never made sense to me either," I said. "Anyway, I think I know who's got Plankton. It's someone Barner doesn't want to believe would do such a thing, so he may need to abuse the three of you uselessly for a short time before he confronts the obvious. But there's not a lot of time to waste." I described the latest news reports about Jay Plankton's tongue having turned up in the Post newsroom.

Thad said, "I'm surprised. I figured these guys to be jokers. Like tattooing Leo Moyle and then letting him go. But this is… how could anybody do something that vicious just because the guy was some jerk on the radio?"

Kemmerer said, "How would anybody even know how to cut somebody's tongue out?"

"Yes," Day said, "I would expect that to be a lost art on Long Island."

But in fact I had read a month or so earlier about just such a practice. "It's still done by some of the nastier security forces in the Middle East," I said. "You blindfold a man, hold him down, somebody pinches his nose shut, out pops his tongue, and then snip, snip."

They all considered this somberly.

Day said, "So do you think it's Middle Eastern terrorists who have Jay Plankton?"

"No, I think it's some gay cops, high on potent recreational pharmaceuticals, and on resentment and rage. What I have to do now is convince Lyle Barner of this with no hard evidence to go on. But if I can convince him, and if I can get Lyle to accompany me out to his boyfriend Dave Welch's house in Hempstead, I think we can free Jay Plankton before an unavoidable kidnapping and assault charge against the man Lyle loves turns into something even worse."

Day and Kemmerer regarded me with apprehension, and Thad listened thoughtfully, as if he was not altogether convinced. Then Day let us into the building with his key, and the three of them followed me up to Day's apartment on the second floor. The apartment door was locked, and when Day opened it we saw that the lights had been left on, but Lyle Barner was gone.