On the Other Hand, Death

2

At four o'clock, Albany still lay blistering under a savage August sun, but the headquarters of Millpond Plaza Associates remained untouched by mere climate. From the outside, the five-story cube of black glass on outer Western Avenue was as austere and inward-looking as the company's two dozen or so suburban shopping malls. Past the revolving door I half expected to find crowds of young matrons toting G. Fox shopping bags and glassy-eyed kids in game arcades, but the airport-departure-gate-functional lobby was deserted except for a uniformed security guard hunched uncomfortably on a high stool. Bouncy music came out of holes in the ceiling, with no consumers to dance to it.

The temperature in the building couldn't have been above sixty and there was a faint odor of synthetic carpeting and cleaning fluids, as in the loan office at a branch bank or the cabin of a DC-10. Coming in from the steaming heat in chinos and a light cotton sport shirt, I wanted to wrap myself in a blanket. Getting on the elevator, I sneezed.

On the more expensively done up and equally well refrigerated fifth floor Crane Trefusis's secretary was seated in a funnel of brightness behind a kidney-shaped slab of white marble. The sleek blonde was groomed as elegantly as a transvestite I knew who once worked briefly behind the LeVonne Beauty Products counter at Macy's, and she wore a big amber bow around her neck, like a TV anchor-woman.

She flashed a rictus of corporate welcome. "Hi, I'm Marlene Compton. May we help you?"

I didn't know whether the "we" was corporate, imperial, or referred to the small television camera mounted halfway up the polished black granite wall and aimed at me. "Donald Strachey to see Crane Trefusis. He phoned." I sneezed again.

The woman mentioned amiably that her sister-in-law was bothered by the August pollen too, then conversed briefly on an intercom.

"Mr. Trefusis will be able to see you right away," she said smiling, as if I'd petitioned for this audience, then ushered me past an unmarked white metal door.

Trefusis's office was a long rectangle of rusts and buff with track lighting and Star Trek furniture upholstered in orange velvet. The sunlight was molasses-colored pouring through the tinted floor-to-ceiling windows; and Trefusis,

moving around from behind his desk with a kind of pained jauntiness, like an athletic man with a bad back, or chronic hemorrhoids, sported deep brown aviator shades. I was afraid he might stumble over something, but he seemed to know his way around the office.

"Good to meet you, Mr. Strachey," he said with a restrained but not uncordial smile. "Your reputation precedes you." His cool hand gave mine a tight squeeze.

"Thank you. Yours too."

He removed the shades and gave me a drolly appraising look. "Sit down and we'll get to know one another," he said, moving back behind the desk. "I'm really quite grateful for your taking the trouble to drive out here. I picked up the impression during our phone conversation that you're somewhat reluctant to work for Millpond- that we are not one of your favorite capitalistic enterprises. Or am I reading something into your manner and tone that wasn't there?"

He was unexpectedly un-ogreish and benign-looking, short and compact in a well-cut chocolate brown silk suit and pale orange tie, with thinning red hair streaked with gray, and sun-bleached eyebrows. His bright china blue eyes were the only objects of their color in the room, which might have meant nothing, or could as easily have been some goofy device with a vaguely manipulative purpose he'd picked up in Robert J. Ringer. I decided that if I ever again visited Trefusis's office I'd bring along six old ladies with aqua anklets and blue hair, just for fun, to see if it affected his powers.

I said, "No, I'm not sure I do want to take on this job for you, Mr. Trefusis-whatever it is. But you asked me to hear you out, and it's no trouble for me to do that much. What's the problem?"

An amiably sly look. "I'm guessing that it was partly your curiosity that brought you out here, Mr. Strachey, am I right? Plus, of course, the large fee I mentioned must also have tempted you enormously," he added, the creep. "But I'm curious too. I'm told you've done work in recent years for other large Albany corporations. Naturally I've gone into that. You evidently are not anti-business to the point of turning away a fat fee when one is offered. I'm sure you could not do that constantly and survive. So, tell me. What exactly is it about Millpond-about me-that makes you so unenthusiastic? I'd really like to know. Be candid."

I'd been in his office for two minutes and the man almost, but not quite, had me feeling sorry for him. I said, "I've been reading in the papers about the way Millpond keeps pushing people around and ripping up the countryside in order to build the kind of shopping malls we've already got enough of. That's really about all there is to it, Mr. Trefusis. See my problem? I'm one of those ecofreaks. If I worked for you, it'd be a sort of conflict of interest."

Having heard all this before, he laughed lightly, knowingly. "Well, maybe one day we can have a drink and I can convince you that, on balance, our way of doing business ultimately benefits everyone, ecologically minded Americans

like yourself included. Ever been to the GUM department store in Moscow, Mr. Strachey? It's a memorably depressing experience. A Soviet citizen once visited our mall in East Greenbush and told me confidentially he thought he had died and gone to heaven. I was impressed by that too."

"You miss the point. It's not retail outlets run by the Bureau of Mines I advocate, Mr. Trefusis.

It's a sense of proportion."

"That's a nice catchy phrase. How about a 'Sense of Proportion Liberation Front'? You should put it on a bumper sticker." He waited for me to chuckle along with him.

I said, "You're planning a five-department-store mall in one of the few unspoiled areas left in west Albany, when we've already got Stuyvesant, Latham Circle, Colonie, Mohawk, Pyramid's mammoth going up in Guilder-land, and dozens of other smaller shopping centers all over the 5 place. Who needs another one?"

"The hundreds of thousands of people who will shop there need it, Mr. Strachey. They need it and they want it."

"Has there been a referendum? I hadn't heard."

He grinned. "They'll vote when the mall opens, my friend. With their K-cars and Toyotas."

I couldn't argue with that, and I hated his being right. And the smaller shopping centers that would turn into plywood-covered eyesores surrounded by twelve acres of littered tarmac when Millpond opened its new mall were of no importance to anyone except the several hundred people who worked in them or lived around them. The throngs en route to Millpond's consumers'

Utopia could carefully avert their eyes.

I said, "On the phone you mentioned a case of vandalism. I guess that's a subject you'd know something about."

The anomalous blue eyes hardened for just an instant, but he caught himself-We Do What Works. "I think you'll find, Mr. Strachey, that in this instance Millpond is on the side of the angels. Your angels," he added brightly. Then, like a TV anchorperson shifting abruptly from a story on the White House Easter egg hunt to a subway station decapitation, Trefusis looked suddenly, and a little phonily, grave. He said, "Now I'm going to show you something that will make you angry, Mr. Strachey." He shoved a file folder across his Maserati of a desk. "Open it," he said darkly.

I opened it. Trefusis watched me while I leafed through a series of eight-by-ten color photographs. They showed, from various angles, a large well-kept white Victorian farmhouse.

The place was surrounded by flowers and flowering shrubs and trees, and was abutted by a smaller white carriage house on which three slogans had been crudely spray-painted in large red letters. One said, DIKES GET OUT; another, LEZIES SUCKS; the third, LEAVE OR DIE! Additionally, a row of pink, white, and deep red hollyhocks along the side of the building had been slashed and mangled.

I closed the folder and slid it back toward him. I said, "Whose house?"

"The owner's name is Dorothy Fisher. Her friend's name is Edith Stout. The house is on Moon Road, off Central Avenue, in west Albany."

Now it was starting to come clear. "I met Dorothy Fisher once," I said. "But I didn't know where she lived."

"It's a vicious act," Trefusis said, shaking his head in disgust. "I hate this kind of intolerance."

"Right. Intolerance is no good. When did this happen?"

"Last night, late."

"You called it a case of vandalism. It's more than that. There's a death threat involved. 'Leave or die!'"

"I don't take that entirely seriously," he said, looking thoughtful. "My guess is, someone's just trying to frighten the… ladies. Wouldn't you say?"

"Could be. And you want me to find out who. Is that it?"

He nodded. "Yes. I do. I'll pay you five now and the other five after an arrest has been made. I'm sure your customary fee is a good deal less than that, but I want to be certain that this business is taken care of quickly, and I also want to demonstrate just how important the matter is to me."

Crane Trefusis, humanitarian. I said, "I guess you know that I know why this is so important to you, Mr. Trefusis."

A little snort of laughter. "No, I hadn't really supposed, Mr. Strachey, that you were just back from a month at the seashore." He looked mildly insulted. "No, I had no illusions about that. No, 6 indeed."

I'd read about it in the Times Union. Millpond had received the necessary environmental and zoning approvals for its proposed west Albany mall and had put together its land package-with one critical exception. There was a lone holdout among the landowners. A Mrs. Dorothy Fisher, whose eight acres were smack in the center of the site, was refusing to sell. She loved her old family home, she said, and planned on living in it until she died. Mrs. Fisher was sixty-eight years old but came from a hearty strain and expected to be around for another twenty or twenty-five years. Millpond had offered her three times the market value of the property, then four times, then five. But money was not the point, Mrs. Fisher insisted. No deal. Millpond was reported to be deeply frustrated and becoming desperate as its delaying costs accelerated.

"So you want to earn Mrs. Fisher's goodwill," I said. "Smite the vicious homophobes and loosen the old dyke up a little so that she'll be more inclined to look favorably on your next offer."

He nodded, poker-faced.

"And by hiring a gay detective to do the job, you further encourage Mrs. Fisher and her friends to concede that Millpond is in the vanguard of enlightened social thought, and to wonder how could she possibly continue to be so stubborn and unreasonable. Why should she refuse to do business with such a nice right-thinking guy like you?"

He looked neither embarrassed nor smirky, nor did he cackle maniacally. He just shrugged. "I see it as a potential happy coincidence of interests," he said mildly. "And if Mrs. Fisher still refused to deal with us after we'd paid you to clear up this unfortunate business for her, then that would in all probability be the end of it. She would in no way be legally obligated to us."

"That's correct."

"I'm prepared to take my chances," he said, smiling faintly. "I've been meeting the public for a good number of years, Mr. Strachey, and I think I know something about human nature. But if I'm wrong-and somehow Mrs. Fisher's gratitude did not extend to accepting our more than generous offer-well, we'd still have the satisfaction of knowing that, whatever the cost, whatever the outcome, Millpond just went ahead and did what was right."

I said, "What a crock."

A faint crooked smile. "You're such a skeptic, Mr. Strachey. I suppose that results from your constantly coming into contact with the seamier side of life. Your outlook, I'm afraid, had become just a little bit distorted, if I may say so."

His statement was not meant to be, so far as I could tell, ironical. I said, "You've got a forty-million-dollar project riding on this."

He threw up his hands in a what-choice-have-I-got gesture and made a face.

Irritated, with Trefusis and with myself, and knowing full well how this loony discussion was going to conclude, I said, "Why don't you just let the Albany cops handle it? They have detectives on their force who will look into the matter for a good bit less than 'ten,' and I happen to know there are several who will investigate a crime for no fee at all."

"Of course they've been notified already," he said, shaking his head doubtfully. "But I want Speedy Gonzales on this one, Mr. Strachey. Someone who can clear it up in a few days. And, as you pointed out, there is the additional advantage for me of your having entree with Mrs.

Fisher and her friends. I've gotten the impression that relations between Albany's finest and the gay community are not what you would call cordial."

"Not cordial, no."

"So there you are."

"Have you told Mrs. Fisher you were planning on hiring me to do this?"

"I… left a message."

"She refused to speak with you today, right?"

"When I phoned her about your possible involvement, yes. I'm afraid so."

"Do you know why?"

"Of course. Mrs. Fisher naturally assumes that Millpond is responsible for the vandalism."

"The vandalism and the threat. Are you responsible?"

"No," he said matter-of-factly.

I waited for a barrage of offended posturings, but the simple denial was all Trefusis had to offer on the subject. A blunt and honorable man of his word.

Timmy, who works for politicians and knows a rat's nest when he sees one, would have advised that I politely thank Trefusis for his confidence in me and then swiftly flee the premises. But once I'd seen those photos I knew I was going to become involved in the case in one way or another. And, of course, Trefusis was hardly going to miss the "ten"-which I could always split with Dot Fisher after encouraging her, if she needed encouragement, to refuse Trefusis's final offer. I could also urge Dot to suggest to Trefusis's that he take the money he would have paid for her property and donate it instead to the Gay Rights National Lobby, now that he was such an ardent and established benefactor of the cause.

Knowing too that none of it was going to work out anywhere near as simply as that, I still went ahead and said, "Fine. I'll take the case."

The brightness of his china blues intensified a degree or two. "I'm pleased," he said, nodding once. "A meeting of minds. I thought we might come to an arrangement, Mr. Strachey, and we have succeeded. Let me write you a check for the five," he said, placidly smiling now and removing a cream-colored checkbook from his inside breast pocket. "Or would you prefer cash?"

"A check will be fine," I said, remembering the reports of Millpond's vaguely tainted capital.

What was I getting myself into?

"And I've got one other thing for you, Mr. Strachey." He reached for a file folder on a shelf behind his desk.

"What's that?" I asked.

He said, "A list of suspects."