Shock to the system

8

Bierly was still unconscious following his surgery, his condition serious but stable. I got just close enough to him to see that a hospital security guard was posted outside his door. When I asked the charge nurse whether Bierly had had visitors, she said a police detective had come and gone and a friend of Bierly's was out in the waiting area. A man named Steven, she said.

A family of Punjabis occupied the corner of the waiting room near the television monitor, peering with interest at Joan Lunden. Across the room from them, glowering out the window, was a sturdy, well-built man in faded jeans and a flannel shirt. His age, fortyish, suggested the flannel was not hip-kid mosh-wear but was a relic of the butch-gay seventies. He wore work shoes that looked as if they had actually been worked in, and he had a ruddy, angular Anglo or Saxon face and thick auburn hair that curled over his collar. He could have been Lady Chatterley's gamekeeper, Mellors, except for the sweetish cologne that became apparent as I approached him, and the look of hostile suspicion the man gave me as I introduced myself. Mellors, an enduring object of erotic fantasy of mine since the summer between my senior year in high school and freshman year in college, would have been delighted finally to meet me, I'd like to have thought, but this guy clearly wasn't.

"Donald Strachey? No, Larry never mentioned you." He gave my extended hand a brusque tug but didn't get up. I sat down beside him and he shifted uncomfortably.

"The nurse said your name is Steven."

"Yes, it is."

"And you're a friend of Larry's?"

"Yes, I am."

"I guess you're pretty shocked and upset, Steven."

"Of course I am."

"Are you two old friends?"

He stared at me.

I said, "I'm a private detective."

This got a look of mild alarm that was quickly replaced with something that looked calculatedly neutral. He said,

"How do you know Larry?"

"On Wednesday he told me he wanted to hire me."

"Hire you? What for?"

"It has to do with the death of Paul Haig. Was Paul a friend of yours too?"

A sheen of perspiration was visible now on his upper lip. His scent was getting stronger too, less perfumy, more Mellors-like. He said, "I didn't know Paul. I mean, not all that well."

"His death was ruled a suicide, but Larry thought Paul was murdered. He never mentioned that to you?" He just stared at me, closemouthed. "It seems odd, Steven, that Larry wouldn't have mentioned it to someone who was close enough to him to visit him in the hospital first thing on the morning after he'd been shot."

This shook something loose. "Well, he did mention that he had some suspicions about Paul's death. But Larry never said anything about hiring a detective or anything like that."

"How long have you known Larry?"

"Not long."

"A year? Six months?"

"About six months."

"Where did you meet?"

He glared. "That's no concern of yours. What right do you have to ask me these questions?" Then he thought of something that made him wince. "Are the police going to question me too?"

"There was one here this morning, a detective by the name of Guy Colson. I guess he missed you. You'd remember him."

"I just got here about twenty minutes ago. I heard on Channel 8 that Larry had been shot, and I drove straight up.

There would be no point in me talking to the police. I don't know anything about who shot Larry. Wasn't it probably a robbery or something?"

"It doesn't look that way. Nothing obvious was taken. Why don't you want to talk to the cops?"

"Because-because I have nothing to offer. I have no information." Sweat rings were evident now under his arms. "I have no idea who would want to shoot Larry."

"What about Vernon Crockwell?"

"Oh, no." He blanched-not blushed, blanched-and shook his head three times.

I said, " 'Oh, no, Crockwell would never do such a thing,' or 'Oh, no, it must have been Crockwell who did it'?"

"I have to go," Steven said. He stood up abruptly and strode toward the corridor.

I followed. "What's your last name, Steven, in case anybody has to get in touch?" He said nothing, just turned in the direction of the elevators. "Where do you live?" He marched down the hall in what looked like a barely controlled state of panic. He worked at the elevator down button repeatedly, as if it were a suction pump and his exertions could make the doors open and the car appear. I stood next to him and waited. When a car finally showed up, I stepped inside with him.

An orderly was on board behind a tiny ancient woman in a wheelchair. "What's that smell?" she said. The orderly made a sniff-sniff face but didn't reply. The two of them got off on the third floor. Steven and I rode down to the first. He watched the floor numbers light up and didn't look at me.

As he moved quickly out the main front door and cut right toward the visitors' parking lot, me breathing hard at his side, I said, "Steven, what are you afraid of?" His pace quickened even more. He said nothing.

"Maybe I can help you. Larry trusted me, and you should too."

He looked frantically this way and that, trying, it seemed, to remember where he parked his car.

"Are you in danger, Steven? If you don't want to get mixed up with the police, you can talk to me and what you say can be between us." He spotted his car and made straight for it. "I think Larry would want you to talk to me, Steven.

When he regains consciousness, he'll talk to me anyway, so let's get a head start on this thing, whatever it is. Let's make sure you don't get hurt, and that nobody else does."

He shook his head once desperately and said, "You don't want to know." Then he unlocked the door of an old black VW Rabbit with mud spatters on the side, got in, slammed the door and locked it, made the engine cough, backed out, and headed for the exit gate. I might have followed the VW if I'd had my car with me. But it seemed sufficient to note the Rabbit's license number, which had a code not for Albany County but for Greene, the next county down the Hudson Valley.

I hiked down New Scotland Avenue and across Washington Park. The city had spruced up the park's cozy shady glens and ample sunny greenswards for spring strollers and loungers. Rank upon rank of canary-yellow and plum-colored tulips lined the walkways, each tulip no doubt a dues-paying member of the Albany County Democratic Party. In the last election, many of them had probably voted.

At my office on Central, I hiked up the window to let some air in and must out. Another chunk of old caulking fell off the pane, so I ran a couple of feet of duct tape along that edge to prevent the decapitation of any of the winos who had come to regard my entryway as a place of late-evening safety.

My machine, more up-to-date than its surroundings, had recorded three calls. The first said: "Hi, this is Larry Bierly calling Thursday night at nine-fifteen. I was just wondering if you'd made a decision about working on investigating Paul's death. Please let me know. I'm at Whisk 'n' Apron till about eleven. Then I'll be home, and then I'll be back here about noon tomorrow. I'm eager to hear what you think, and I really hope you'll take the case. Vernon Crockwell should not be allowed to get away with murder. Thanks."

Bierly had been shot just two hours after placing this call. He did not sound apprehensive, as if he had learned anything startling since I'd met him the evening before. I'd checked the machine from home not long before Bierly's call. But even if I'd gotten the message, it was unlikely I would have told him anything that would have prevented his walking out to the farthest reaches of the mall parking lot and being gunned down just after eleven. Nor could I have informed him that I had decided to hire on with him, or not to, for I had made no such decision on Thursday night. And I still hadn't. I needed to know more.

The second call on the machine went like this: "Don." This carried a tone of reprimand and was followed by a breathy pause. "Don, thissus Phyllis Haig. You never got back to me, Don." Another pause, as if she might be expecting my live or recorded voice to respond. "Well, fine then." More heavy breathing. "Don, are you there? Are you gonna pick up?" Now came a couple of sharp bangs and some scratching sounds, as if she had dropped the receiver. Soon she was back. "Hey, are you gonna take the cake-take the case? Or aren't chu? Don, you gotta get that Bierly cocksucker. That fairy has gotta pay. I'll make him pay for taking my Paul away from me. I'll-" The receiver hit something and fell again, but after more fumbling I was left with a click and a dial tone.

The third call was from my other potential client. "This is Vernon Crockwell calling, Donald, at eight-twenty-five A.M. Friday. Please contact me at your earliest convenience. Larry Bierly has been shot and seriously injured, and the police apparently regard me as a potential or actual suspect. They are on their way here to interrogate me now. I don't know which is more harmful to my reputation, Donald, the police being seen entering my office or my being seen at the police station.

"Donald, I've been in touch with my attorney, Norris Jackacky, and he has repeated to me his opinion that in spite of your misguided and ultimately futile lifestyle you are the most capable private investigator in Albany. You can probably take some satisfaction in knowing that you've got me over a barrel, and I'm in no position to hold your deviant sexuality over you. We can discuss sexuality later, if you prefer.

In any case, please call me at my office to discuss this more urgent matter at your earliest convenience. Thank you."

I had a quick flash of Crockwell "over a barrel," where he was "in no position" to hold my deviant sexuality over me. Could he be…? No, almost certainly that wasn't it. Arch-homophobes did occasionally turn out to be homosexual psychopaths. There had been at least one gay-bashing congressman caught with a call boy, and countless reactionary men of the cloth who couldn't keep their hands off hitchhikers or altar boys. And of course there had been J. Edgar Hoover railing against the commie-homo menace whenever he wasn't off-duty with Clyde Tolson rhumbaing in a darling cocktail dress at the Stork Club.

But for Crockwell to have devoted his entire professional life to the relentless exorcism of gay men's sexuality while he was secretly gay himself wouldn't have been just sick, it would have been monstrous. Not that some gay men Roy Cohn, probably Hoover-weren't monstrous. It was always a possibility. As was deeply repressed homosexuality that sometimes surfaced in the form of horrified fascination with gay sex and the urge to stamp it out.

But that was getting into realms beyond me-in most cases probably beyond anybody's sure grasp.

What did seem certain, though, was some kind of odd, powerful connection among Crockwell, Haig and Bierly and possibly "Steven" and others-that went beyond what I knew or had overheard on the tape of Haig's and Bierly's last session with Crockwell's cure-a-fag group. If so, then what was this connection, and was it somehow getting people killed? It was time to learn more about the other members of the therapy group. end user