Death trick

19

The red and orange Continental 727 From O'Hare climbed out of the rusty haze over the Chicago suburbs and banked west. The tourist section was only half-filled; I had three seats to myself and did not have to sit like a mannequin in storage. The cheap seats in the four or five back rows were thigh-to-thigh with students and families on no-frill tickets, and when I walked past them en route to the lavatory they peered up at me like kittens in a box.

Chicken in brown jelly over Iowa, watery coffee across Nebraska, then southwest over the faded autumn fields and foothills until the Rockies loomed up off the right wing like Afghanistan.

By two-fifteen I had my bag in hand, had rented a Bobcat, and was in the car studying a map of greater Denver. I wanted York Street, in what the car-rental clerk had called the Capital Hill District, "the part of town where the city people live." That sounded right.

I drove west into the city on Colfax Avenue, found its intersection with York Street, then doubled back up Colfax and checked into a motel four blocks away. I phoned Timmy at his office in Albany and gave him the name and phone number of the motel. I put on my jogging gear, consulted my city map again, and headed back towards York. Denver, Timmy had told me, was noted for its high, thin, filthy air. But on that day Denver was warm and odorless, and the mountains looked clean and serene off beyond the city skyline with its State Capital cupola and slab office towers a mile west of where I trotted along the sidewalk.

I turned up York, which was lined mainly with closely spaced, bulky old brick houses and, here and there, set close to the cottonwood-lined street, a newer three- or four-story apartment building of the California-nondescript style. The address for Kurt Zinsser was on a red brick Victorian manse with turrets and curved windows. I walked up the front steps and checked the big front door, which was locked. There were six mailboxes and buzzers, and I pressed the button under Zinsser's name. No response. I rang again. Nothing.

I jogged on up York, checking the parked cars along my route for Wyoming tags with a rental-car code. I saw none.

I cut right, then left up another street, and soon arrived at Cheesman Park, the big municipal swath of green I'd seen on my map. The still-fresh lawns sloped gradually down for a couple of blocks from where I stood, away from a granite neoclassical pavilion, from whose steps I had a dazzling view of the western sections of the city and the mountains beyond.

I rested for a while. I remarked on the weather to a chunky, sloe-eyed young Chicano, who walked me to his apartment, back toward York Street, and we had a Coors. He answered my questions about gay life in Denver-I wrote down the names of bars and organizations-and I told him about Albany. Our stories were similar, except homosexual Denver was much more populous, the gay mecca for all the Sneeds Pond boys from most of the plains states and half the Rockies. Boomtown.

In bed I became short of breath, and Luis said it was the altitude-it took a week or two to adjust. My inclination was to look for a calendar, but I didn't.

He said he hoped we'd run into each other again, and I said truthfully that I hoped so too but that it was unlikely, inasmuch as I'd be returning to Albany in a day or two. I gave him my Albany address, "in case you ever," etc. We kissed goodbye, and I jogged-ambled-back over to York Street.

I tried Zinsser's buzzer again, and again there was no answer. It was five-fifteen. I walked back to the motel and took a nap, after asking for a wake-up call at eight.

I halved my exercise routine, showered, dressed, dined at Wendy's, walked back to the motel, looked up Kurt Zinsser's number in my notebook, and dialed it.

"Hello?" Chris Porterfield.

"Hi-Don Strachey. I'm in Cheyenne. How long does it take to drive down there-two hours, three?"

She hung up.

I drove the Bobcat over to York Street and parked across from Zinsser's building. In twenty minutes they came out carrying three suitcases. They moved quickly up the street, and I had to walk fast. I caught up with them as they were opening the door to Porterfield's Hertz car with the Wyoming tags.

"Hi, gang. Say it now, say it loud, we're gay, and we're proud." They looked at me as if I were a creature that had dropped out of the tree we were standing under. "Look, I'm Don Strachey, and all I want to do is talk. Really-"

Blount dropped his bag and bolted up the street. Zinsser, short, a bit portly, with dark angry eyes staring out over a Maharishi-style face full of hair, flung his suitcase down and came at me, one hand pushing into my face, the other grabbing at the fake fur collar of my bomber jacket.

As we grappled, I caught glimpses of Chris Porterfield standing there, suitcase still in hand, looking fed up, as if her bus were late. I kneed Zinsser in the groin, and as he doubled over cuffed the side of his head. As he went down slowly, I got behind him and whomped him in the seat of the pants with my gay clone work shoes. He grunted, and I took off up the street after Billy Blount.

At the first intersection I looked both ways and caught sight of him off to my right, a block away.

I took off, gasping and wheezing and noticing a funny clamped feeling at the sides of my head.

Blount hung a sudden left, and I broke into a full sprint. By the time he reached Cheesman Park, he had only half a block on me. We charged across the grass under the stars; on the mountainside, off in the distance, I thought I saw a huge, lighted cross. I hoped it actually existed. My ears were screaming.

Beside some shrubbery at an exit on the far side of the park from where we'd entered it, I caught up with him. I lunged and brought him down. His fists flew, and he kicked and grunted,

"Motherfucker! Fucking asshole motherfucker!" He was strong, but frantic-too frantic to know what he was doing-and when I pounded my fist into his midsection, he curled up and concentrated on getting his respiratory system functioning again. I sprawled beside him and worked toward the same end.

He started to get up, and I shoved him down on his stomach and fell on him. My mouth was at his ear, and I gasped into it "You stupid shit, I'm trying to get you out of this fucking mess! They want to put you back in Sewickley Oaks, and they're using this thing to do it to you, and since you acted like a damn fool and ran away, the only way you're going to stay out of that place is to help me find out who really killed Steve Kleckner!"

I yelled it and he wrenched his head away, but he'd understood me. He stopped squirming and lay unmoving except for the heaving of his back as he struggled to get his breathing under control.

After a moment he turned his face toward mine and said, "I don't even know who the fuck you are!"

"Didn't Chris tell you?"

He looked like his photograph, except he'd shaved his mustache, and the old black-and-white photo the Blounts had given me hadn't brought out the high color of his smooth skin or the depths of his black eyes. As we lay there panting together, our faces nearly touching, I thought: Shit-again. I thought about getting up and walking away and phoning Timmy to ask him if he'd go away with me to an island somewhere where we'd be the only men for hundreds of miles around. Then I could do it- thought I could do it.

Blount said, "Chris told me you were probably okay, but she didn't actually know you, and anyway you're working for my parents, who are a menace to civilization. Isn't that the truth? Isn't it?"

"The menaces hired me, yes, but I'm using their money to work for you." A faint private smile on his face. I'm damned if I know what your parents believe, but I do not believe you killed Steve Kleckner. Did you?"

He looked as if he'd have swung at me if I hadn't had his arms pinned down. "Of course I didn't!"

He spat it out.

I relaxed my grip, and when he didn't move, I rolled off him and sat up. I said, "Then who did?"

"How the fuck would I know? Was I there when it happened?"

"I don't know, I wasn't there either. If you weren't, then where were you?"

"In the shower. You knew that. I heard Chris tell you Sunday night."

"And I believed it," I said. "I'm familiar with your after-sex habits. I know Huey Brownlee."

"You know Huey? Is he okay?" He rolled onto his side and studied me, his breathing coming back, the tension draining.

I said, "Huey's fine, no thanks to you. Huey and I were acquainted prior to all this. He's a good man."

A wistful look. "Yeah. He is."

"I've met Mark Deslonde, too. And Frank Zimka."

He looked at the ground and picked at a clump of grass. "Oh. How's he doing? Old Frank."

"He misses you quite a bit. I've got a letter from him in my car. And I've got some questions about old Frank."

The sound of voices calling. I looked up over the shrubs we'd tumbled down beside and could make out two forms moving across the park from where Blount and I had come in. "Bi-l-l-y Bi-l-l-l-yy-"

"Your friends are here." He started to stand, and I took his arm. "Look, why don't we check in with them later. We'll talk first, and then I'll drop you back at Zinsser's apartment. We'll go to a bar I heard about. Ted's. It sounds nice."

"No. You know Ted's? No-anyway, no. They'll be worried." He got up. "It's okay. You'd just better be straight- what's your name?"

"Don Strachey."

"Well, Don Strachey, if you're a cop or something-if you're fucking me over-Kurt has a lot of friends who won't take shit-"

"Am I alone, or am I alone? If I were a cop, would I come after a murder suspect with the Hundred and First Airborne or alone in a rented Bobcat? Which makes more sense?"

He waved and shouted, "We're over here."

They came trotting. They stopped about ten feet away, watching Blount for some signal.

"He's okay," Blount said. "It's cool. He'd better be." They all looked at me.

We were just twenty feet away from the street that paralleled the bottom edge of the park. I'd seen people stand up around the pavilion when I chased Blount across the grass, and one of them must have phoned the police. A cruiser pulled up.

"Everything okay here?"

I noticed that my jacket was ripped, and I gestured with my eyes to Chris Porterfield. She glanced at Billy, who nodded. She said to the cop, "Yes, is there some problem?"

"Somebody reported a fight. You see two guys run by here in the last ten minutes?"

"We just arrived, officer," Zinsser said. "There's no curfew, is there?"

The cop said, "Eleven o'clock. I'd watch myself in here, though. Lotta fags."

"Are they dangerous?" Zinsser said.

"Only if you bend over." We could see him shaking with delight. "I'd say you're safe, Miss." We guffawed heartily.

He drove away.

Zinsser said, "The law." He spat.

Back in front of Zinsser's apartment, I retrieved the two letters to Billy Blount from the glove compartment of the Bobcat. I'd retaped the flap shut on Zimka's note and carefully glued the one from the Blounts. I'd tell Blount, in due course, that I'd read the letters, but just then I needed to solidify his trust, misplaced as it may have been in that particular matter.

Chris Porterfield was in a snit. Her strong, big-boned face frozen in hurt anger, she stomped up the stairs to the apartment and charged into the bathroom, slamming the door. She'd asked how I'd found them, and when I said through a friend in L.A. who knew friends of Zinsser's, she didn't believe it. She thought Margarita Mayes had betrayed her.

Kurt Zinsser was still nursing the bruises I'd left on his tailbone and ego, though by the time we were seated in the apartment, he'd accepted me enough-he knew of Harvey Geddes-that he was lecturing me on the necessity of a reborn and expanded Forces of Free Faggotry. I couldn't disagree with him. Of all the radical movements that formed in the sixties, the FFF had to be among the bravest and most just. Zinsser talked about regrouping and mounting a "spring offensive." Meanwhile he was doing the work he'd been educated to do, as a data analyst in the computer section of a large hospital.

The apartment was spacious and calming, with high ceilings, lots of polished dark wood, and a fine parquet floor. The bookshelves were stacked with revolutionary literature from Marx to Fanon to Angela Davis. The more recent volumes were by authors of a milder outlook, and when I remarked on this, Zinsser muttered that not much else was available. New times.

Blount went into the bathroom with Chris Porterfield, and I could hear them talking but couldn't make out the words. From time to time she wept. I tried phoning Margarita Mayes, but when she didn't answer, I remembered she'd gone off to stay with a friend and I didn't know which friend.

Maybe Porterfield knew, but she was the one who was pissed off and incommunicado. I decided to butt out; it was their problem.

Porterfield came out with wet eyes and began rummaging through the suitcase beside the daybed I was stretched out on while I waited for the household to regain its equilibrium. Blount stayed in the bathroom, and soon I could hear the shower running. I felt it happening again and casually rolled onto my stomach. Showers now. Hopeless.

Porterfield found a little vial of something-or-other. She said, "Who did you say you talked to in L.A.?"

I explained again.

She took the pills into the kitchen and I heard her turn on the faucet. Sound of a glass filling, faucet off. After a moment, a phone being dialed. The kitchen door eased shut.

While Zinsser told me anecdotes of FFF exploits, Blount came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and went into the bedroom. I gave him time to dress, then excused myself from Zinsser, followed Blount into the bedroom, and shut the door behind me. I saw the two letters, from Zimka and the Blounts, lying on the East Indian print bedspread, unopened.

I said, "Let's talk."

"Beg your pardon?" He was standing barefoot in fresh jeans and a white T-shirt, noisily blow-drying his hair in front of a dresser mirror.

"Go ahead," I yelled. "I'll wait."

I sat in a wicker chair and read The Guardian while Blount groomed himself. After the dryer came a hot-comb, then some touching up with a pocket comb. Che Guevara at his evening toilet.

I said, "You're not going out tonight, are you?"

"No, why? I've gotta work tomorrow."

"Where do you work?"

"A record shop. Gay-owned, a friend of Kurt's. It's all under the table. I can't use my real name or Social Security number or I could be traced. Kurt knows about all that."

"What's your new name?"

"Bill Mezereski. Kurt picked it. Like it?"

I hoped Billy Blount was cleared soon, because I couldn't wait to tell Jane Blount of her son's Polish alias. I said, "Sounds workable."

"I'm just getting used to it."

"It looks as if you're cutting yourself off from your past entirely. Except for Chris and Kurt.

That's too bad. I've gotten the idea there've been some good things in your life in Albany."

"That's true." He came over and sat on the edge of the bed across from me. "But do I have a choice? I'm never going to be locked in an institution again, ever, and I'll do anything I have to to avoid that. I mean anything." I looked at him. He said, "Well, almost anything."

I said, "You have a choice. Once we've found the person who killed Steve Kleckner and turned the Albany cops around and pointed them at the obvious, you'll be free to do anything you want with your life. You're twenty-seven, and if you've committed no crime, your parents can't touch you."

He sat back against the headboard. He said, "I've committed crimes."

Uh-oh. "Which?"

"Consensual sodomy. A class-B misdemeanor in the state of New York that'll get you three months in the county jail. For me that's three months too long."

"Don't be an ass. Let anyone try to prove it."

"I thought you'd been around, Strachey, but I guess not that much. It's been done."

He was right. And I thought I knew Jane and Stuart Blount well enough that I wouldn't put anything past them. There were others in my profession who'd take on the job of gathering evidence. It was rare, but it happened, and you always had to be a little afraid. Especially if you had people in your life like the Blounts.

I said, "There are plenty of people around who'll help you stay out of jail, me among them. My first concern, though, is keeping Kleckner's murderer from killing again. You can't argue with that, and you've got to help. You're the only living person who can."

His face tightened and he sat looking at his lap for a long time. Finally he said, "I know. I've thought a lot about that. Especially after Chris told me what happened to Huey. Chris and I talked about it. Kurt, too." He gazed at the bedspread.

I waited.

"I'm not going back," he said. He looked up at me. "Of course I want the killer caught, and I'll help you as much as I can. I'll talk to you. But I am not going back. Is that understood?"

I said, "Okay."

He fidgeted with the cuff of his jeans. He swallowed hard and said, "What do you want to know?"

"You're doing the right thing," I said. "You won't be sorry. The night it happened-begin at the beginning and tell me the whole thing. Minute by minute. Take your time, and don't leave anything out."

He reached for a pack of Marlboros on the night table and offered me one. I said no thanks. He lit One. I said, "I've been checking up on your habits, but I didn't know you smoked."

"I don't. Except about once a month."

One of those.

I asked him again to tell me the story of that night in Albany twelve days earlier. I wanted him to relax, so I suggested he begin with the events in his life that had led up to that night, and he did.