Strachey's folly

Chapter 11

I awoke midmorning on Monday to a warm and hazy blue day, with the Washington outside my hotel window all but shut down for the federal holiday.

This twenty-four-hour memorial to Christopher Columbus was primarily an Italian-American holiday, even though Columbus had been on the royal Spanish payroll in 1492 and had actually opened up the New World for Spanish, not Italian, conquest. What if Columbus had sailed west, say, on behalf of the Venetian Republic? How would the Americas be different today? Politics and government in many nations might more readily be carried out with the consent of the governed. For hundreds of years people would have traveled up and down the North and South American continents not on horseback but in gondolas, and later vaporetti. Instead of eating rice and beans, people south of the Rio Grande would sup on brodetto and seppie alia veneziana.

I laid out this historical conjecture for Timmy over good coffee and even better croissants at a Second Street cafe. He explained to me that in 1492 Venice had its own lucrative easterly routes to Asia and would have had no need to go sloshing off into the unknown western seas. I told him he was missing my point.

He wouldn't drop it though and insisted on asking what my point was.

Luckily, Chondelle Dolan showed up just then. She had joined us at my request, to give us an update on the police investigation of Maynard's shooting.

We preferred her company to Ray Craig's. We sat around one of the little tables on the sidewalk in front of the cafe, and we quickly spotted Craig repeatedly circling the block in an unmarked car; he cruised by and peered over at us every three or four minutes. This made Timmy nervous, but Chondelle said, "It's just Ray being Ray. When he's out in public, the department should make him wear a sign letting people know that he's relatively harmless."

Timmy said, "Relatively?"

"Yeah."

"Relative to what?"

"To a couple of other people in the department whose names I won't mention.

The names wouldn't mean anything to you anyway, Timothy."

Timmy shook his head, then changed the subject. He had gotten up early to go check on Maynard, and he said Maynard had opened his eyes several times, although he had not yet spoken.

"It looks like he's going to be okay," Chondelle said. "That's the good report the division is getting, too."

"I noticed," Timmy said, "that a D.C. police officer has been posted outside Maynard's room. Who arranged that? He wasn't there yesterday."

"That was recommended by Lieutenant Craig."

"Why?" Timmy said, looking up with a cappuccino mustache.

"Ray's pursuing the drug-gang angle, and he told the captain he didn't want to risk losing a witness."

I said, "Craig thinks Maynard might be a member of a drug gang? He tried that one out on us, too, but he seemed to have no basis for the theory other than that Maynard was shot by a man who looked Mexican."

"Ray paints with a broad brush," Chondelle said. "A cousin ‹ ›f mine in the narcotics division told me Ray had requested any information they had on Maynard Sudbury, but the inquiry drew a blank. It's possible the request was just Ray covering his behind io justify the order for the hospital guard, which he wanted for some other reason."

"Which might be what?" I asked.

"Dunno. But I'd like to find out. One good thing, as far as you two are concerned, is this: Jim Suter's name hasn't come up anywhere in the Sudbury shooting investigation. Or anywhere else in the system. So if your aim is to keep his name out of this until you get to him, you're doing okay."

"I'm going down to the Yucatan tomorrow," I said. "But it's a big place and I haven't got much of a lead for tracking Suter down. The problem is, if I try to get information by approaching people in Washington who know him, they might have connections to the people he says are trying to kill him. I'd tip them off to his location-or, if they already know where he is, to the fact that he's letting people know that he's in some kind of bad trouble. And they might just finish him off."

I went on to describe to Chondelle my trip to Pennsylvania and my bewildering encounter with Mrs. Krumfutz. I told her how, despite Mrs. Krumfutz's essentially plausible denial of any knowledge of Jim Suter's current troubles, it was she, Timmy had learned, who had introduced Suter to the Mexican boyfriend Suter went to Mexico to be with-now, apparently, to hide out with.

Chondelle said, "It sounds like it won't hurt if you just go ahead and ask Mrs.

Krumfutz who the boyfriend is and where they are. If she's not involved in whatever it is Suter is afraid of, there's no risk at all for him or you. If she is involved, you've already alerted her that you're interested in Suter and there's not much more damage you can do than you've already done. Of course, if she thinks you've got something on her, then you can bargain with her. Unless she just lets on that she's going along with your wishes and then has Jim Suter shot dead and, just to be on the safe side, she arranges to have you blown away, too."

Timmy flinched. I reached for my coffee cup.

Chondelle went on, "But it sounds more like her husband is the baddie here, if anybody in the family is. So both of you are probably okay for now. Anyway, look-how about if Sudbury's friend Hively, the writer for the Blade, calls up Mrs.

Krumfutz? Hively can say he's doing a story on the mysterious Jim Suter quilt panel, and he heard Suter was in Mexico with his boyfriend Jorge, and does she know how to get in touch with Jorge? Why wouldn't that work?"

Timmy looked doubtful. "I don't think Hively would call Mrs. Krumfutz without some explanation from us as to what this is all about. He's a nosy reporter, after all. And if we tell him the truth, then he's involved in this-whatever it is-too. I don't want to do that to anybody else."

Chondelle sipped from the second of the two double espressos she'd ordered, then said, "So what if Hively didn't call her, but somebody saying he was Bud Hively of the Washington Blade did? That would work just as well, if you ask me." She set her cup down, winked at me, and gazed at Timmy, waiting.

Timmy said, "Uh-uh. Not me."

"Why not?" Chondelle asked.

"For one thing, I've always been a terrible liar."

"It wouldn't take but a minute. You could prevaricate for one little minute, I'll bet."

I said, "Timothy, it would just be a small social lie."

He reddened. "No, it wouldn't. It would be much more than that."

I said, "You see, Chondelle, he went to Georgetown. He was educated by Jesuits."

"Yeah," she said, "Clinton went there, too, I hear."

"Look, I'm not all that pompously self-righteous," Timmy said. "Jeez, give me a break. It's not that I've never told a lie. It's lhat I'm really bad at it. I'll blush and probably stutter."

"Mrs. Krumfutz will never see you blush over the phone," I said. "And to her, you'll sound as if you're just another homosexual with a speech impediment."

Timmy fumed for another minute, but finally agreed to impersonate newspaper reporter Bud Hively and phone Mrs. Krum-liitz. He said he guessed the morality of his doing so was sound overall, though muddy, and his biggest concern was his inepti-lude as a liar as a result of a paucity of experience. We kidded h i m some more about the lofty moral plane he lived on. It was one of the characteristics that had drawn me to Timmy nearly twenty years earlier, and which had made me want to remain with him through hard times and easy, except, of course, whenever his rigidity made me want to flee the sound of his voice.

Five minutes later, after Chondelle had obtained Betty Krum-futz's Log Heaven phone number through a police department source, we sent Timmy to a pay phone around the corner on Pennsylvania Avenue to lie through his teeth.

While Timmy was gone, Ray Craig made another pass and squinted over at us.

He must have spotted Timmy at the pay phone and wondered what we were up to now. But Craig didn't stop. He just continued on down the block and hung a left at the corner.

Timmy was back in three minutes. He was wearing a half smile as he seated himself. He slurped up some cappuccino from his cup.

I said, "So?"

He grinned a little dementedly. Now he knew he'd go to hell, but apparently he didn't give a fig. "Jorge is Jorge Ramos. Ramos and Suter met in her office, yes, but Mrs. Krumfutz doesn't know Ramos very well. He's a friend of Alan McChesney, who used to be her chief of staff in the House. McChesney now runs the office of Congressman Burton Olds. McChesney often vacations in Ramos's house on the Caribbean coast, below Can-cun, and Mrs. Krumfutz said that if Jim Suter is with Ramos, that's probably where they are. She gave me the name of the village near Playa del Carmen." Timmy lifted his cup again and drank from it.

Chondelle said, "Nice work, Timothy. No offense intended, but it looks like you're a better fibber than you thought you were. It's nothing to be proud of, but it can come in handy, can't it?"

I said, "So you are adept as a liar. This changes everything. I may never believe another word you say."

"Neither of you two guys ever told a lie to the other one?" Chondelle asked.

Timmy said, "No."

I said, "Not for many years, so far as I am able to recall."

"It was amazingly easy getting the information out of Mrs. Krumfutz," Timmy said.

"She asked me if our conversation would be off the record, and I said yes. She said she did not wish to be quoted in the Blade on anything having to do with the AIDS quilt, and she did not wish to have her name mentioned at all in connection with it. I said that was fine, that I just wanted to track down Jim Suter for a story I was writing about a quilt panel that had mysteriously appeared with Jim Suter's name on it, even though he is believed to be alive and well.

"She said wasn't that odd, as if she'd never heard of the Suter panel. Obviously, I didn't mention your encounter with her, Don, and I didn't say anything about pages from Suter's campaign biography having been ripped off the panel-Bud Hively wouldn't have known about the campaign-bio pages. But I did ask her if she had visited the quilt display. She said no, she'd never seen it, but she said she'd heard it was big and colorful. Then I thanked her and said I supposed she was enjoying the fall foliage up in Pennsylvania-nature's quilt. She said, oh, yes, she certainly was."

I said, "You actually called the Pennsylvania fall scenery 'nature's quilt'?"

Timmy smiled slyly.

Chondelle said, "Timothy, it sounds to me like you're a natural at this. If I ever need somebody to tell a big fat lie for a good cause, I'm gonna call you."

Still looking almost smug, he said, "Don't bother. In the fu-lure, I'll only lie for Donald. This is something that's just be-iween me and my honey pie here."

I said, "What in God's name have I done? I may need to take you back to the priests, Timothy, and sign you up for an ethical lune-up."

He chuckled, but then Ray Craig rolled slowly by, and Timmy's mood abruptly darkened again. He said, "What does 11uit man want with us?"