Strachey's folly

Chapter 10

Mrs. Krumfutz just snickered at the idea of Mexican paid killers, and she found it preposterous that Jim Suter had any connection at all to her husband's criminal activity, the exact nature of which I could not get her to specify. I thought her repeated references to "my scrapbook" referred to additional records she had kept on the campaign-finance scam, but I wasn't sure of it, and as she began to sense how little I actually knew about her husband's activities, she grew even cagier and less forthcoming on that subject. Nor did Jim Suter seem to have anything to do with whatever it was that had gone on in Mrs. Krumfutz's house that night and which I pretended to have witnessed but hadn't actually. I had only just seen two people kneeling side by side, or so it seemed.

Moreover, Mrs. Krumfutz denied visiting the AIDS quilt the day before and having fled in fear from Jim Suter's panel. Nor could she imagine why anyone would sew a section of her campaign biography on an AIDS quilt panel.

"Is Jim dead from AIDS?" she gasped. "But you just talked as if he's alive."

"He is alive, but he's in danger."

"What do you mean? How do you know?"

How much could I tell her? It had all gotten too confusing. Was she putting on an act? This was possible. Here was a woman who had been elected to Congress with the backing of the pious religious right, yet in private she connived like and spoke in the language of an Albany Democratic-machine ward healer, circa 1935.

Taking no chances, I said, "Jim may be in trouble, but I don't know where he is or exactly what the problem is. On behalf of a mutual friend, I'm watching out for him and his interests."

Now she looked perplexed all over again. "Nelson is taking an interest in Jim Suter? That's hard to believe. Nelson always called Jim 'that fairy writer.' Jim's a homosexual, you know." "I know."

"As far as I was concerned, Jim being a homo was up to him. I hired him to write literature for my congressional campaign."

"Uh-huh."

"Homosexuals always end up in trouble." "Where were you yesterday afternoon," I asked, "if you weren't at the AIDS quilt?"

"That is none of your concern. None whatsoever." "Three people saw you at the quilt."

"No, they didn't. They might think they did, but they didn't. Or, those three people are bald-faced liars."

I had been one of the three-Timmy and Maynard were the others-who had seen a woman Maynard had identified as Mrs. Krumfutz examining Jim Suter's quilt panel on Saturday and then rushing away, frantic and distraught. And yet, when I'd turned up spying on her through a rear window of her house fifteen minutes earlier, Mrs. Krumfutz gave no indication that she had ever seen me before. Or was that an act? And if it wasn't-what? Were there two Betty Krumfutzes?

"Have you got any sisters, Mrs. Krumfutz?" "Yes, why?" "Do you have a twin?"

"You mean an evil twin, Donald? No. My sister, Fran, is older and a good bit heavier than I am. She lives in Engineville and she's never been farther south than Harrisburg. So nobody saw her at the AIDS quilt, that's for darn sure.

Anyway, she'd be afraid of catching it."

"I understand that you ran an antigay TV ad against your opponent in your first Republican primary. He'd accepted a donation from a college gay group, and you hit him hard for it, saying this showed he would support same-sex kissing instruction in the public schools. Wasn't that unfair?"

"Sure, it was unfair. So what? Advertising is unfair. Politics is unfair. Life is unfair.

I'm not here to promote fairness. I never said I was."

"Oh, I see. What are you here to promote, Mrs. Krumfutz?"

I'd walked right into it. She gazed at me serenely out from under her cherry-pie-motif head scarf-she seemed to have some device stuck in her pinned-back hair, but I couldn't make out what it was-and said, "I believe I have been put on this earth to promote the right to bear arms and the rights of the unborn. I know in my heart that in both cases-no matter how ruthless and cold-blooded my means may seem to some people-I am doing the Lord's work. Any other questions?"

I couldn't think of any.

Mrs. Krumfutz was able to convince Horse Henderson that my spying was just one unsavory feature of a nasty divorce proceeding, and she told him that she preferred not to press charges against me. She said she had nothing to hide and that her prosecuting me locally might suggest to some people that she did have some dirty laundry to cover up, even though it wasn't true. "You know how people are," she said, and Officer Henderson said he did. He returned my wallet and let me go, although plainly he wasn't happy about it.

I drove back into downtown Log Heaven and stopped at the only eatery open on Main Street, an old greasy-elbow diner called Teddy's. It had a grill in the steamed-up window laid out with rows of wieners, the ones on the left burnt umber, the ones on the right mauve. I went in and had two burnt umber ones with chili sauce, plus a cup of high-octane coffee. There would be plenty of opportunities back in Albany for arugula and bent-twig tea. To deal with the Krumfutzes, I needed fat and caffeine.

When I came out of Teddy's, a squat man who'd been leaning against the building when I went in spoke to me. He said, "Duh-buh." His hand came out of his windbreaker pocket and he tipped his porkpie hat.

This one, I was sure, wasn't part of any plot, big or small. He was just a contemporary fixture of Main Street America. I said, "Nice night."

As I got into my rental car and drove away, the man watched me go.

I gassed up at a convenience store, punched sixty or eighty digits into a pay phone, and reached Timmy. It was after ten and he was back in our room at the Capitol Hill Hotel.

"Maynard is showing signs of regaining consciousness. We're all trying to be optimistic." Timmy added some clinical details, then said, "I've also been doing some discreet detective work that's paid off."

"Hey, good for you."

"I've gotten to know a lot of Maynard's friends and his brother Edwin, and Edwin's wife, Laurie. They're a good bunch, and being with them today has made this thing a whole lot easier."

"Great. What was the discreet detective work that paid off?" "It turns out that one of

Maynard's friends knows Jim

Suter, too."

"You brought Suter's name up? Isn't that risky?"

"Why? Do you suspect there's a big, wide-ranging, monstrous conspiracy under way involving dozens of corrupt and dangerous people? Hmm."

"You know what I mean." I hadn't even told him yet that since my confusing encounter with Betty Krumfutz I no longer had any idea what to think. "I just thought we had agreed to play it safe and not bring Suter into it until I had caught up with him in Mexico and heard his end of the story."

"The thing is, I didn't have to bring Suter's name up. People had seen the quilt vandalism story on television, and when they were discussing it, one guy mentioned he knew Jim Suter and he was shocked. He didn't think Suter had AIDS and he didn't think he was dead. This guy, Bud Hively, a writer at the Blade, the D.C. gay newspaper, said he had seen Suter six or eight weeks earlier, and that Suter had told him he was leaving soon for Mexico. Suter didn't mention any danger he was in- or at least Hively never brought it up. Suter just told Hively he had a boyfriend in the Yucatan and he was planning on spending the winter down there."

"Did you extract any other details, I hope? Such as who's the boyfriend, or what he does or where he lives?"

"I didn't learn as much as I'd have liked. I mean, how nosy could I afford to appear?" "Not very."

"I did find out that the boyfriend's first name is Jorge and that he and Suter would actually be living in two locations. The boyfriend has a place in Merida as well as a beach house on the Caribbean coast south of Cancun. And he's financially well-off, Hively said."

"This is a start. All I have to do to locate Suter is find well-off Jorge of Merida and Cancun."

"There are two other possibly helpful shreds of data. One is, Maynard's friend Dana Mosel, a Post reporter who was at the hospital with us, is doing a follow-up story on the quilt vandalism. She was as intrigued as everybody else by the idea that an AIDS quilt panel had shown up memorializing a living person. She asked Bud Hively for a list of Suter's family, friends, and acquaintances, and as Hively was reciting those he knew, I memorized them and later I wrote them down. I think I bollixed up only a couple of the names."

"That is good work, Timothy. You'll be rewarded for this." "Thanks. I'm keeping my head, Don. I really am. Even if I'm really still quite frightened. I'm chained and dead-bolted in our room and I can't wait for you to get back here. So you're actually coming back to D.C. tonight? I got your message. How come you're not staying up in Pennsylvania?"

I gave him a ninety-second version of my abbreviated visit to Log Heaven: how I had learned of the sometime-gun-toting Mexicans who'd done a "job" for Betty Krumfutz; how I had been caught prowling behind her house and ended up confronting her; how she assumed I was working for her husband and I let this misapprehension stand in order to facilitate my escape from the Log Heaven Police Department; and how it now appeared that Mrs. Krumfutz had no connection to Jim Suter's danger and that the job the Mexicans had performed so ably for the former congresswoman seemed to have been no more than yard work.

But, I told Timmy, Mrs. Krumfutz had lied to both me and the Log Heaven cop when she said she was alone in the house. And she did have, I had learned, a guilty secret that her husband could blackmail her with once he discovered what it was, which she now believed he had-although she had the goods on him, too, and their battles with each other now appeared to be stalemated.

Timmy said, "So you don't think she's involved in Jim's danger or the attack on Maynard?"

"I'm inclined to doubt it. Anyway, I think I am. For now."

"Then who was that frightened woman at the quilt that Maynard thought was Betty Krumfutz?"

"Beats me."

"So you've more or less decided she's not involved at all in what's going on here?"

"I think I've decided that. But I'm not sure."

"Hmm."

"Mrs. Krumfutz is certifiably amoral and devious on behalf of her causes. She brags about that. And her husband I'm even less sure about. Also, according to the missus, Nelson Krumfutz has been up to his neck in something that could land him in prison for the rest of his life. She says she's got proof, so my guess is it's more campaign-fund chicanery. And this might or might not be the criminality that Jim Suter says certain dangerous persons think he knows about.

Anyway, I'm not getting anywhere near Nelson just yet. First it's important that I talk to Suter."

Timmy breathed deeply. "Well, I hate to say this."

"What?"

Two more noisy inhalations.

"What? What?"

"The other thing I found out from Bud Hively about Suter and his Mexican boyfriend is this: Jim met his terrific new boyfriend, he told Hively, through a friend who Jim wouldn't normally have thought of as a person who'd be serving as a gay dating service. And that friend is-you don't want to hear it- Betty Krumfutz."

"Oh?"

"Oh, yes."

"Hell."

"Yeah."

"Well, it'll all come clear. But not tonight. I'm leaving Log Heaven now. I should arrive down there between two and three. I'll ring you from the hotel lobby so you can let me in. Okay?"

"Sure. Drive carefully."

"I will. Traffic will be light."

As I rang off, I remembered something. I pulled from my pocket the letter Jim Suter had sent to Maynard from Mexico. I looked at the way he had signed it:

"Your friend Jim, still unlucky in love." Did that mean, as it seemed to, that the wonderful boyfriend had not worked out?

Before I left Log Heaven for the drive to D.C., I made a final swing past Mrs.

Krumfutz's house on Susquehanna Drive. All the lights were out now-it was just past ten-thirty-but the pickup truck was still in the driveway next to the Chrysler. I made a U-turn and pulled up the driveway so that my headlights caught the truck's rear plate. I noted the number and the state, Texas, then backed out and drove quickly-but not so quickly as to attract attention-out to the interstate.