Death trick

3

I drove over to my place on Morton. I could see my breath in the air in the front room, went to the kitchenette, set the oven at 450, and opened the door. Ten days. Hurlbut the landlord would make steam October fifteenth, the day he left annually for Fort Lauderdale. Then I could grow orchids on the windowsill and fungus on my shoes until the old man reappeared to shut off his rain forest machine on March fifteenth, the first day of Hurlbut's summer.

I set the phone on the kitchen table, propped my feet on the oven door, and phoned three people I knew who'd been involved in the early days of the gay movement in Albany. Each expressed roughly the same opinion about Billy Blount: that he was a decent, likable young man, if slightly pushy and opinionated, who had dropped out of the movement several years earlier because he found the local organizations insufficiently radical in their outlook and tactics. Each man I talked to was skeptical of the official view that Blount had killed a man, but none had any idea where Blount had gone or even who his current friends were. I'd have to find out the hard way.

I flipped on the TV for the six o'clock news. Dick Block, action man for the anchor news team, was squinting into the camera trying to puzzle out the names and places of the day's calamities. Fresh news on the Kleckner murder was not among them. I stripped to my briefs and did sit-ups while Snort Harrigan grappled disgustedly with the sports report.

I remembered the envelope the Blounts had given me for their son. I dug it out of my jacket lining and slid it into the jacket of Thelma Houston's "I'm Here Again."

I went into the bathroom, showered, and shaved. I spotted a single white hair in my mustache, probed around and got a grip on it, and yanked it out. I checked my armpits, chest, and groin. No change below the neck yet. That was when you'd know it was for real.

I went to the daybed, set the alarm for eight-thirty, pulled the old Hudson Bay blanket over me, and slept.

"Tell me about the Blounts," Timmy said. "I get the impression they aren't exactly Albert and Victoria."

We were heading down Delaware toward Lark in the Rabbit. Timmy was beside me in a Woolrich shirt over a dark blue turtleneck and faded jeans the color of his eyes. I had Disco 101 on the radio-Friday-night pump priming-and they were playing Stargard's "Wear It Out."

"They're more like the duke and duchess of Windsor," I said, "by way of Dartmouth, Sweetbriai, and the Fort Orange Club. I think they might have a few vital parts missing. They talk as if their kid might come out of all this with the Nobel Peace Prize."

"Kissinger got one."

"Yeah, but the Albany County DA's office wasn't consulted."

"I heard they were. It was part of a deal worked out with the mayor, the Swedish Academy, and a vending company in McKownville."

"Ahhh."

We swung onto Lark.

"Even so, they must be upset with all the publicity. People with old Albany names like Blount prefer their names on downtown street signs, not in the newspapers. The social pages are okay, and then eventually a seemly obituary. But the front page is bad taste, pushy. It's for the Irish and the Jews."

"This is true. The missus especially is not pleased with the gay angle getting bruited about. She thinks that part of it's all a horrid misunderstanding, anyway. She says her boy has 'tendencies.'"

"A phase he's going through."

"The craziest thing is they seem to be looking at all this as some kind of opportunity-make the best of it, the missus said. They've got a weird relationship with their son. There's a lot of tension and bad feeling over the way he lives, yet he seems to keep coming back to them when he needs them or when he wants to embarrass them. They sound like they expect this recent messiness to lead to a big, wonderful final reconciliation. Or something."

"It'll be interesting to get Billy Blount's slant on the relationship."

"It will."

I turned up Central and found a parking place a few doors past the Terminal Bar. We went in.

On weekends the Terminal was misnamed. It was a relatively quiet neighborhood drink-and-talk pub where on weeknights people often dropped in for an hour or two. But on Friday and Saturday nights the bar was where a good number of gay men started out for the evening before ending up at the big shake-your-ass-bust-an-eardrum discos on up Central. Those who hung around the Terminal until four A.M. closing were mostly the "serious drinkers," many of them alcoholics, who sometimes, in moments of clarity, referred to the bar as the Terminal Illness.

We bought fifty-cent draughts and moved through the murk beyond the pool table and the bar to the back of the room, where we knew we'd find friends. One of the five tables was empty-it was just after nine, early yet. Another table was occupied by three theological activists in the gay Happy Days Church, gazing mournfully into their beer, pitched, as they always seemed to be, in medieval gloom. Happy days, glum nights, I guessed. Some fresh-faced SUNY students sat at another table in the company of an older admirer. Timmy and I spotted a couple of the Gay Community Center crowd and went over to their table as the Rae's "A Little Lovin'" came on.

"Where've you guys been hiding yourselves? Haven't seen you since-last night." Phil Jerrold, a lanky blond with a crooked smile and what Timmy once described as "a winning squint," shoved his chair aside so we could squeeze in around the little table.

"Is it tonight?" Timmy said. "I thought it was still last night. When I'm in here, I get mixed up.

What night is it, Calvin?"

Calvin Markham, a young black man with the aquiline features and high forehead of an Ethiopian aristocrat, said, "I really wouldn't know the answer to that. I know it's October, because my hay fever's gone. That's as close as I can get, though. Sorry. What time is it?"

I said, "Nine twenty-six. At nine twenty-seven will you become cheerful and optimistic, or have you just been told you have third-stage syphilis?"

Calvin and Phil looked at each other. They began to laugh. "Clap," Calvin said. "I've got clap. I don't have the test results yet, but I know-I know-that I've got clap."

"Oh," I said.

Timmy said, "Maybe it's something else. Can you get hay fever of the crotch?"

"Not after the first frost," Calvin said.

We laughed, but Calvin didn't. I'm getting another beer." He went to the bar.

"Where'd he pick it up?" Timmy said. "The tubs?"

Phil said, "It was the first time he'd been there in six months. Like Carter said, life is unfair."

"I thought Nixon said that."

"No, it was Carter. To the welfare mothers."

"Yeah, but Ford said it first, to the COs."

Timmy said, "No, I think it was Anne Baxter to Bette Davis, and when she said it, it made Thelma Ritter wince. Hey, can I say that? Are we still allowed to make Bette Davis jokes, or have they become politically incorrect?"

"It is politically acceptable," Phil said, "if you do it once a month, but not if you do it every ten minutes. That is no longer permissible. Thank God."

"Well, these are new times, aren't they? I think I feel an identity crisis coming on. You know, that's how I found out I was a homosexual. When I was seventeen, I was walking through the park and an older man pulled up beside me, leaned out his car window, and whispered a Bette Davis joke in my ear. I loved it, and all of a sudden I knew."

Phil said, "That's the most touching coming-out story I've ever heard. Where has sophistication gone?"

'To Schenectady, I think. A man was arrested in the bus station over there last week for impersonating Monica Vitti. Don't get me wrong, I mean I love trendy Albany, but really, I think you have to concede that progress is a very mixed blessing."

We conceded this unenthusiastically and drank our beer. Calvin came back. The juke box was playing "Good Times" by Chic.

I asked what anyone had heard about the Kleckner killing.

"Just what's in the papers," Phil said. "The cops still haven't found the Blount guy. They sure as hell better catch up with him fast and get him locked up. A lot of people are damn nervous with a gay psychopath running around loose, me included."

I asked Phil and Calvin if they had known Billy Blount.

"I remember when he used to come to the center," Calvin said. "He was kind of snotty and always going around acting like he was better than you were. Most people weren't too crazy about him."

"A lot of repressed anger," Phil added.

"Who are Blount's friends? Do you know anybody who knows him?" They thought about this but couldn't come up with any names. I said, I'm looking for him, too. Blount's parents have hired me to find him."

"Jesus, no kidding. You think he's in Albany?"

"I don't know. I'm just starting."

"We should have known you'd get mixed up in that one," Calvin said. "The weird people you hang around."

Timmy said, "Thank you."

"I mean his customers-clients, or whatever they're called. Who was that one you were following around last month? The one with the pet pigs?"

"He wasn't the client. His wife was the client. She thought he had another woman he was sneaking out to meet. What he had was a small pig farm out in East Greenbush. A secret pig farm. I caught the guy in the act of feeding his pigs one night- got some nice shots with the Leica, too-and then I started feeling sorry for the guy and went over and talked to him. I asked him why he didn't just level with his wife about the secret pigs, and the poor devil began to weep. He said she'd never understand, that it would destroy his marriage.

He was an assistant commissioner in the Department of Mental Health."

Phil said, "Well, consensual pig farming is one thing, but getting involuntarily stabbed to death by your trick is definitely something else. A lot of the disco bunnies are scared shitless.

Especially out at Trucky's. Blount is the one who did it, isn't he?"

"I don't know. It looks that way. How's business at Trucky's? Are people coming back? Truckman has had his hard times."

"Wednesday night was packed," Calvin said. "It was two for one. And people aren't going to the Rat's Nest much anymore. Not with the cops still hassling them. I heard on Monday they arrested the bartender and two customers. In the middle of the afternoon they busted in, and there were fifteen people in the back room!"

Timmy said, "It isn't just for breakfast anymore," and we groaned obligingly.

The Rat's Nest was a new place on Western Avenue about a mile beyond Trucky's, just outside the Albany city limits in the village of Bergenfield. It was what the papers coyly called controversial and was the Albany area's first "New York style" gay bar, with black lights, crumpled Reynolds Wrap on the ceiling, and nude go-go boys on a wooden platform that looked like an executioner's scaffolding.

In the back of the Rat's Nest was a separate grope room with a bartender in a dirty jock strap and lighting that would have caused a wildcat strike by any mildly assertive local of the United Mine Workers. The advertising slogan for the Rat's Nest was "Come in and Act Disgusting," and when it opened in mid-summer, there were those who predicted the place would be laughed out of existence.

It was not. The Rat's Nest boomed for nearly a month, drawing most of its hundreds of regular customers away from Trucky's, where "acting disgusting" was much rarer, more random, and not so aggressively institutionalized.

And then it happened. The Bergenfield police force began a series of raids on the Rat's Nest, arresting employees for serving liquor to minors, which may or may not have been the case, and busting patrons on dope, drunk and disorderly, and, in a few cases, consensual sodomy charges.

The crowds fled-most of them back to Trucky's, where the death by stabbing of a popular disc jockey caused a dampening of spirits and a jittery watchfulness, but no mass move to a less tainted nighttime hangout.

A couple of the Central Avenue bars, witnessing the unexpected popularity of the New Decadence, made gestures in that direction. One disco, teetering on the edge of extinction, changed its name from Mary-Mary's to the Bung Cellar and regained its wandering clientele overnight. Another bar was less successful. The owner of the Green Room attempted a "Western" motif by hanging a child's cowboy hat on a wall sconce, but this was not enough.

We left the Terminal at ten and made our way up the avenue, hitting all the gay watering holes and discos except Myrna's, the lesbian bar-an oversight that turned out to be a mistake on my part. I'd been an investigator for nearly fifteen years: army intelligence; the Robert Morgart Agency; four years on my own. But I was still learning.

I talked to the doormen and bartenders in all the spots we hit, and while some said yes, they knew who Billy Blount was and had seen him around, none knew him except by name and none knew who his friends were. I did not speak with the disc jockeys-they were absorbed in their art, like marathon runners or poker players-but I collected their names and phone numbers so I could check them out later if no leads developed elsewhere.

We lost Phil and Calvin at the Bung Cellar, then headed out Western and hit Trucky's, the bar where the murdered DJ had worked, at two-fifteen, when the disco night was peaking. Debbie Jacob's "Don't You Want My Love" was on when we went in. The place was jam-packed and smelled of beer, Brut, fresh sweat, cigarette smoke, and poppers. The dance area at Trucky's, in the back beyond a big oval bar, had flashing colored lights on the walls, on the ceiling, under the floor. It was as if Times Square of 1948 had been turned on its side and people were dancing on the neon signs. The music, pounding out of speakers the size of Mack truck engines, was sensuous and ripe, with its Latin rhythms and funky-bluesy yells and sighs, and the dancers moved like beautiful sexual swimmers in a fantastic sea.

Timmy and I made our way through the crowds along the walls, stopping to shout into the ears of people we knew, and danced for six or eight songs. We bought draughts then, and I made arrangements to talk to the bartenders after closing at four. Timmy headed back to the dance floor with an assistant professor of physics he knew from RPI, and I went looking for Mike Truckman.

The owner of Trucky's was not hard to spot. He'd been a famous football tackle at Siena College in the early fifties, and at six-three or — four and a mostly well distributed two-ten, he still cut a formidable figure in his pre-Calvin Klein white ducks and a bulky-knit black sweater that almost concealed the beginnings of a paunch.

I found Truckman in a corner uttering sweet nothings to and massaging the neck of a notorious hustler I'd seen on the streets but rarely in the bars. He was a smooth-skinned, athletic-looking young man with a smug, sleepy look and a green-and-white football jersey with the number 69 stenciled on it. Cute. I didn't feel bad about interrupting.

I'd met Truckman on several occasions, most recently at an early summer National Gay Task Force fund-raiser for which Truckman had donated the drinks, and he remembered me. I told him what I was doing. He stared hard at me for a few seconds, then slugged down a couple of ounces of whatever was in the glass he held and signaled for me to follow him.

We made our way past the disc jockey's glassed-in booth, turned, and went into an office with a thick metal door marked Private. I shut the door behind me. Truckman had been a bureaucrat with the New York Department of Motor Vehicles before he'd opened his bar two years before, and he'd brought his tastes, or habits, of office decor with him: gunmetal gray desk, filing cabinet to match, steel shelving along the wall. The bass notes from the speakers outside the door bumped and reverberated into the little room and made the metal shelves sing.

I said, "I feel like I'm in the basement of the Reichschan-cellery. I hope you're not going to offer me a cyanide tablet."

The crack was ill-timed, and Truckman did not laugh. He sat behind his desk, made further use of his half-full glass of what smelled like bourbon, and I hoisted myself onto a stack of Molson's crates.

"Whadda you wanna know?" Truckman said in a boozy-gravelly voice. I'm cooperating with everybody on this thing, but I don't know what the hell else I can tell you. Christ, this fucking thing is just dragging on and on. Christ, I dunno. What am I sposed to do? Christ, I dunno. It's just a tragedy, that's what it is, just a fucking terrible, terrible tragedy."

He was drunk, and it had changed his personality from the one I knew. I remembered Truckman as a serious man, and sometimes agitated, but never morose and confused. I doubted that he'd made a habit of this. People who ran successful bars stayed sober. He brought a dirty white handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped the sweat from his forehead and neck. He had a big, craggy face with a wide, expressive mouth and would have been matinee-idol handsome if it hadn't been for his eyes, which were cold gray and ringed with puffs of ashen flesh.

I said, "I'm sorry, Mike. I'm sure this is rough. Were you and Steve Kleckner close?"

"Whaddya mean, 'close'?" A sour, indignant look. "Sure, we were close, that's no secret. Christ, Steve looked up to me, you know? What I'm saying is, Steve respected me for how I was so up front about being gay and how I always did so much for the movement-one hell of a lot more than the other bar owners did, the assholes. Steve thought I had-Christ, you know principles."

He grimaced. A rick of milkweed-color hair stuck out over one ear, and I wanted to pass him my comb.

I said, "I didn't know Steve. What was he like?"

He squeezed his eyes shut with his free hand. "A nice kid," Truckman said, shaking his head.

"Oh, such a nice sweet kid Steve was. But-naive. God, was that kid naive! Steve was naive, but he was learning, though, right? Steve was young, but he was catching on. We all have ideals, right? But you've gotta be tough in the way you go about it. A means to an end, right?"

He was beginning to slur his words. I said, "Right."

More bourbon.

I said, "Mike, you're drunk."

He shook his head. "Nah, I'm drinking but I'm not drunk. Anyways, Floyd's out there, the doorman. Floyd can run the place if I feel like taking a drink. Floyd can do it, right?"

I nodded. I asked him why anyone would want to hurt Steve Kleckner.

He rolled his eyes at some imaginary companion off to my right. "Christ, how would I know the answer to that? You'll have to ask the sonovabitch who did it, right? If the goddamn cops ever catch up with the little shit."

"You mean Billy Blount?"

"Hey, the Blount guy did it, dinnee? I thought everybody knew that- the kid Steve left with here that night. With here. Here with."

"Did you know Blount?"

"Nah, but I saw it happen-saw Steve and that little shit turn on to each other. I mean, don't get me wrong, right? I was glad to see it, honest to Christ, I was. I was glad to see Steve being so up for a change. Christ, moping around here the way he was, I just wanted to pick Steve up and shake him."

"How come he'd been down?"

Truckman emptied his glass and brought a new bottle of Jim Beam from his desk drawer. He kicked the drawer shut and filled his glass as well as a second one. He said, "Join me."

"I've got a stein of your fifty-cent horse piss outside. Thanks, I'll stick with that. Why had Steve been depressed?"

"Dunno. Maybe his rose-colored glasses fell off." He drank.

For an instant I wondered if Kleckner had actually worn rose-colored glasses, like Gloria Steinem's. It wouldn't have been unprecedented at Trucky's.

I said, "Had he talked about it?"

"Nope, unh-unh." He poured the drink for me that I'd declined.

"Had you ever seen Steve with Blount before?"

"Not that I remember. The cops asked me that. Fucking cops."

"Why 'fucking'?"

"Oh, you know, Don. You should know. Cops."

"Have they been hassling you?"

"Nothing to speak of. Drink up."

"Vigorish?"

"Nah. They fucking hadn't better try."

"What did you tell the cops about that night?"

"What all I knew, why shouldn't I? That Steve and the Blount kid danced, and horsed around, and left about an hour before closing. Shit, Steve could of done a lot better than that kid, a fucking lot better. And now look what happened! It's just a tragedy, that's what it is, a fucking terrible, terrible tra-guh-dee."

His eyes were wet, and he tugged out the hankie and wiped his face. Then, more bourbon. He said, "Don, you're not drinking."

I sipped. "Do you ever wish you'd stayed with the state, Mike? You had a nice neat, clean life down there."

He snorted messily. "Hah, that's all you know! At the department it was everything but murder.

Hell, no! I'm doing what I wanna do, Don. And no way- no way — am I gonna lose it, right? You wouldn't. No way, baby."

I said, "Business looks good."

"Yeah. S'good." He gazed down morosely at his drink.

"I want to talk to your bartender after closing."

"S'up to them. Floyd'll be locking up. I'm cuttin' out at four."

"Heavy date?"

"H-yeah. Real heavy."

"The cute number in the witty jersey?"

"Nah," Truckman said. "Not him. He's for later." He shut his eyes and laughed bleakly at some private joke.

"Well, I suppose you could do worse." "Oh, I do-ooo do worse." He gulped down the rest of his drink. "I sho nuff do. Hey. Don. How 'bout a drink?"

I guessed Truckman knew more about Steve Kleckner's recent life than he'd told me, but he was in no condition to be reasoned with, or pressured, or led. After Truckman's office the stench of smoke, poppers, and hot sweat outside it was a field of golden daffodils. I found Timmy at the bar talking-shouting- to a sandy-haired man of about thirty in a plaid flannel shirt.

Timmy leaned up to my ear and yelled, "I've got one!"

"One what?"

"One friend of Billy Blount's. Don, this is Mark Deslonde. Mark, Don Strachey."

He had soft brown eyes, a fuzzy full beard, neatly trimmed, and a tilt to his head that was angled counter to the slant of his broad smile. I didn't know whether he practiced this in front of a mirror, but it was devastating, and if Timmy hadn't been there it would have had its effect on me.

Not that it didn't, a little.

I said, "Can we go somewhere?"

He smiled again and said okay and slid off his stool, and as we turned toward the door, Timmy cupped his hand over my ear and said into it, "You can do me a favor one of these days."

I said, "See you around-Tommy, wasn't it? I've really enjoyed myself and I hope we run into each other again sometime." I kissed him on the forehead. He laughed lightly.

Deslonde and I went out and sat in the Rabbit. The air was frosty, and a cold, luminescent half-moon hung over the motel up the road and across Western from Trucky's parking lot.

"You're friend is nice," Deslonde said, still grinning. "Is he your lover?"

"Sort of," I said. What the hell was I doing? "Well, yes. He is. We don't live together."

"That's smart. It makes discretion possible. I lived with my ex-lover for three and a half years. It was great for the first two. Until one of us started fooling around once in a while, and because we were living together, this was noticed. Nothing heavy, right? Just the occasional recreational indiscretion. But

Nate was Jewish enough, or insecure enough, to believe in monogamy, and that was the beginning of the end."

I said, "Do you have regrets?"

"Sure."

"Timmy says you're a friend of Billy Blount's."

"Yes, I know Billy. Your lover-whom you don't live with- says you're a detective. But not a cop, right?"

"Right. Private."

"Then you'd have a license."

I stretched out and dug my wallet out of my hip pocket. He studied the laminated card, and I put it back.

Deslonde said, "Smoke?"

"Love it."

He took a joint from his shirt pocket and lit it. We passed it back and forth while we talked.

"I'm working for Billy's parents," I said, determined to concentrate on something other than Deslonde's face. "They want to help him."

"I'm sure they do," Deslonde said evenly. I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic.

"How do you know Billy?"

"My old roommate and Billy were involved for a couple of months, before Dennis freaked out and took off for Maine. Billy and I kept running into each other in the bathroom in the morning, and one day I gave him a lift out to Colonie. I work at Sears."

"Sportswear?"

"Automotive supplies."

Strachey, you ass. "Right," I said. "Billy works at the, ah, Music Barn."

"I live right up the street from Billy on Madison, and he started riding out to Colonie with me regularly. Sometimes we went out together, or with other people, out here or to the Bung Cellar.

We got to be pretty good friends after a while. Billy's really one of the more stimulating people I know and quite enjoyable to be around. In fact, I've become very fond of Billy over the past few years. There's nothing sexual in the relationship; it just didn't work out that way. Billy and I talked about that once. We both found each other attractive, but sometimes the chemistry just isn't there, right? And then other times it is." He looked at me and grinned.

"Yeah," I said. "Funny how that works." I could feel the damn thing stirring. I said, "Where do you think Billy might be?"

"I have no idea."

"Do you think he's innocent?"

"Yes. Of course he is."

"How can you be that certain?"

"Because I know that Billy hasn't got a violent bone in his body."

"Uh-huh." I shifted, tried unsuccessfully to cross my legs. "I've gotten the impression that Billy is rather an angry young man. How does he let it out?"

Deslonde laughed. "Yeah, Billy is not one of the more relaxed people I know. What he does with all that indignation is he runs off at the mouth a lot. He can bend your ear for days on end about the world's four billion homophobes. I'm a realist myself-I told him maybe he ought to shop around for another planet."

"Maybe he's the realist. We seem to be stuck on this one."

He rolled down the window and flipped the roach onto Trucky's gravel drive. He exhaled and said, "For some of us the realistic thing is to find a way to eat and pay the rent. Try coming out as a radical faggot when you spend thirty-eight hours a week at Sears Automotive Center. I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but I thought you'd understand that. Or are you independently wealthy?"

He looked at me with his beautiful skewed smile again, but this time there was a hardness in his eyes. I wanted to do something to show him how I really felt about him. I shifted position again.

"I know what you're saying," I said. "There's neurotic secretiveness, and then there's discretion. I am not opposed to discretion. I've even been known, from time to time, to indulge in it myself."

What had I said? He'd been watching me, and now suddenly he burst out laughing, a big robust ha! ha! ha! ha! He gave my thigh a quick squeeze and then, still smiling, lit another joint.

I said, "About Billy Blount-remember him? Billy Blount?"

"Oh, right. Billy Blount. Let's talk about Billy some more." He grinned and passed me the joint.

Our fingers touched.

"What about, uh, Billy's parents? How was his relationship with them?"

"They must be a pair," Deslonde said. "I've never met them, but Billy talked about them sometimes, and they sounded like real horrors. Tight-assed old family types. He wasn't crazy about them, and Billy was frustrated with the way they hated his being gay. But I wouldn't say they really preyed on his mind much. He just stayed clear of them, and that made life easier."

"They said he brought a trick to their house last month."

He shook his head and laughed once. "Oh, boy, what a screw-up. I'd asked to use Billy's apartment that night-my straight cousin was job hunting in Albany and staying in mine, and I had a friend I was going to sleep with coming up from Kingston-so Billy said I could have his place and he'd take his chances in the park. It was one of those gorgeous hot nights, and you knew everybody'd be out. So he meets this hunk from Lake George, see, and he's really turned onto this guy, but they've got no place to go. It was dumb-Billy knew it-but they went to the Blounts' place, which was right across the street. His parents weren't supposed to be back from Saratoga until Labor Day, and-well, you know the rest. Bingo."

"No, actually I don't. I was wondering what they managed to accomplish in the way of sexual bliss on that mahogany museum piece?"

He looked uncomprehending. "Come again?"

"They spent the night on Mrs. Blount's antique sofa. Or so I've been told."

"That's crap," Deslonde said. "They spent the night in Billy's old room. They were downstairs smoking and about to leave when the Blounts busted in with guns blazing. They were pissed, and Billy really was embarrassed. I don't think he's seen them since."

"So his relationship with his parents was strained and unhappy. But there was nothing about the relationship that struck you as-a little weird?"

"Weird? No. Awhile back-a long time ago, it must have been-the Blounts did something that still makes Billy furious when he thinks about it, something that hurt him a lot. But he never told me what it was. It was something so painful he couldn't even make himself talk about it. But since I've known him he hasn't been bothered by them very much. It's as if they hardly exist."

Another new perspective. Why was I surprised? It was nearly always like this, Rashomon with a cast of sixteen.

I said, "I've got to find him and talk to him. He hasn't been in touch with you?"

"No, I wish he would. I'd like to help him."

"Who are his other friends? Somebody might know something. Has he ever mentioned out-of-town friends?"

"Here in Albany there's a guy named Frank Zimka who Billy sees once in a while. We've all gone out together a few times. He lives off Central-Robin or Lexington, I think. Sort of a weird guy, actually; he deals dope, and I get the idea he hustles. I could never figure out what Billy saw in him, and when I tried to find out, Billy didn't want to go into it. He just said something like, 'Oh, Frank can be fun sometimes.' Except if Frank was ever a barrel of laughs or whatever it is he has to offer, it definitely was not in my presence.

"Then there's a black guy over in Arbor Hill Billy sleeps with once in a while. I met him a couple of times, too, and they seemed to have a nice simpatico relationship. Nothing very intense, but nice. His name is Huey something-or-other. He's a construction worker or something and he's into martial arts. I think it's Orange Street he lives on.

"Out of town, I don't know. Billy had some radical gay friends once who live on the West Coast now, I think, and he might be in touch with them. When he quit the movement in Albany-the guys here are too wishy-washy for Billy the revolutionary-he talked about moving out to California, but by then his friends' organization, whatever it was, had fallen apart, so he didn't go.

I don't know what their names are out there."

Frank and Huey were two of the first names written on the back cover of Billy Blount's phone book. Along with Deslonde's and one other.

"Did he ever mention somebody by the name of Chris?"

"No," Deslonde said, trying to remember. "I don't think so. Who's he?"

"I don't know. A name Billy wrote on his phone book. And a number."

"Call him up. He might be helpful. Or cute. And discreet." He chuckled.

"I will," I said, shifting again. "What about an Eddie? This would be someone out of Billy's past he'd be excited about running into again."

Deslonde shrugged and shook his head. "Unh-unh. Never heard of him. No Eddie."

"You mentioned your old roommate. Dennis, was it?"

"Dennis Kerskie."

"How long ago did he leave Albany?"

"More than two years ago-almost three. Dennis went off to the forest in Maine to live off berries and write his memoirs."

"Was he an older man?"

"Twenty-two, I think. He and Billy were a hot item for about two months until one day Dennis suddenly decided to purify his body and give up french fries, Albany tap water, and sex. He'd read a leaflet somebody handed him in the Price Chopper parking lot, and his and Billy's relationship deteriorated very rapidly. Dennis left town about two weeks later, and I don't think Billy ever heard from him again. I know I didn't."

It was ten to four and people were starting to drift out of Trucky's and head for their cars.

"Just a couple of other things. Were you with Billy the night he met Steve Kleckner?"

"For a while, I was. I gave him a lift out here, but then he got this heavy thing going with the Kleckner guy, and when I was ready to leave around one, Billy said to go ahead, he had a ride. I told all this to the police. Should I have?"

"It happened. I'm sure they got the same story from other people, so don't sweat it. How was Billy acting that night? Unusual in any way?"

"No, I wouldn't say so. He looked like he was having a good time. Actually, so was I. I'd met this tall number named Phil and went home with him. Real nice. Somebody I wouldn't mind running into again."

"Blond, with a squint?"

"That's Phil. Do you know him?"

"He's at the Bung Cellar tonight. He'll probably end up in the park. Another fresh-air freak."

Deslonde looked at his watch, then did his head-smile thing. "Maybe this night won't be a total wipeout after all."

I gave him a quick, tight smile. "Right. It's early." I hiked out my wallet again and gave him my card. "Do Billy a favor and call me if you hear anything, okay?"

"Business cards. That's a new twist." He did it again.

"I do this for a living."

"I’ll bet you do."

He got out of the car, then leaned back in through the open door. He smiled and said, "See you around, Don. Meantime, don't do anything discreet."

I'll check it out with you before I do," I said. "You're the expert."

He laughed. We shook hands, and he shut the car door. He walked toward the other side of the parking lot. He looked back once and grinned. I watched him go and sat for a minute concentrating my mind on a bowl of Cream of Wheat. Then I went inside.

Timmy was just coming off the dance floor. "Where did you go to talk? The Ramada Inn? Mark has a way about him, doesn't he?"

I said, "He was helpful. How did you find him?"

"He found me. I was asking around about who might know Billy Blount when Mark walked up to me and said, I don't know where you came from, but I love you.'"

"He didn't."

"You're right, it was different. I was standing by the DJ's booth, and he very shyly edged up and asked if I'd like to dance. I acquiesced."

"You raise acquiescence to a high art"

"I do?"

"One of us does. Whichever."

The music stopped. The thirty or forty people left in the place began drifting toward the front door. Fluorescent lights came on, turning all our faces a hideous gray. People walked faster. Mike Truckman moved unsteadily toward the cash register, removed a wad of bills from under the tray, stuffed it into his jacket pocket, and exited with the crowd.

I talked with the bartenders while they gathered up glasses and ashtrays and empty bottles. They added little to what I knew. On the night before Steve Kleckner was found dead, Blount and Kleckner had danced and drunk together, seemed to everyone to have hit it off famously, then left Trucky's around three. The bartenders noticed all of this because Steve Kleckner had been depressed and preoccupied the previous two weeks-Kleckner had refused to tell anyone why and with Billy Blount, he had snapped out of that. No one had seen them together before.

None of the bartenders knew Blount except by face and first name, but they all knew Kleckner.

None could think of anyone who particularly disliked Steve Kleckner, who invariably was described as happy-go-lucky and a real nice guy. Not helpful. I did learn, however, that the person who knew Kleckner best was an ex-roommate named Stanley Loggins, who lived with his lover on Ontario Street-and that Steve Kleckner had once had an affair with Mike Truckman.