Strachey's folly

Chapter 14

When I met Timmy at eight at a Thai restaurant near Dupont Circle that had been recommended by one of Maynard's friends, he was despondent. He told me that he had just visited Maynard again. And while Maynard's condition had been upgraded from stable to fair, Timmy hated seeing his friend so weak and damaged, so helpless, so not the person Maynard had always been.

" 'Fair,' they're labeling him," Timmy said. "He didn't seem so 'fair' to me. I asked him if he felt 'fair,' and he shook his head. But I told him he was improving, day by day, and he nodded and-I think-tried to shrug. But if what Maynard is is 'fair,' I'd hate to see him doing poorly."

"You did see him doing poorly Saturday night, on that sidewalk in front of his house. 'Fair' is preferable to that."

"True."

"Any estimate on when Maynard will be able to speak?"

"Maybe tomorrow, the nurse said. And I'm not the only one waiting to talk to Maynard. You-know-who was up in Maynard's room nosing around a while ago."

"Ray Craig?"

"Smelly Ray."

"When you and I met, I must have smoked as much as Ray does. I must have stunk that way, too."

"You did. It was awful."

"How did you stand it?"

"You said you intended to quit. And you did. Anyway, I'd spent a month once visiting an Indian friend who lived next to a chemical-fertilizer factory in Poona.

So I'd developed an adaptability toward vile odors when the cause was good."

"Lucky for me."

"Yep. Me too."

Timmy and I were seated at a table for four against a side wall at the Bangkok Flower. We were waiting for our two dinner companions, Martin Dormer and Peter Vicknicki, two of Jim Suter's embittered former lovers who had since met and become friends. We didn't know what they looked like, but the maitre d' had been alerted to send them our way.

I asked Timmy if Ray Craig had spoken to him, and he said, "Yes, and he asked where you were."

"What did you say?"

"I told him you were dropping some clothes off at the dry cleaner's."

I laughed. "Why did you say that? I think I know."

Timmy laughed, too. "You probably do. It was the first thing that popped into my head, and I guess I was trying to plant the idea that maybe Ray ought to have some clothes dry-cleaned, too. Although, Don, even Freud said, sometimes a cigar is only a cigar."

"No, I don't think Freud ever actually said that. That was disinformation put out by the behaviorists."

"Right. Next you're going to tell me Freud never said, 'Round up the usual suspects.' Or, 'At least we had Paris.'" _ t "No, those are both Freud."

"Anyway," Timmy said brightly, "if Craig was in the hospital checking up on Maynard, that means he wasn't following you. That's reassuring."

I could have said, "Yes, but maybe Craig had you under surveillance and one of his junior officers was following me," but Timmy already had enough gnawing on his mind. Anyway, I had watched carefully for a tail out to Silver Spring, and I hadn't spotted any.

I said, "I suspect maybe Ray has done some checking on us, Timothy, and he's been reliably informed that we're not likely to turn out to be agents for the Medellin cartel. Did he say anything to you about how the shooting investigation was going?"

"No. I asked, but he didn't answer me. He just asked where you were. Maybe it's because he's an orthodox Freudian that he always answers a question with a question."

I said Timmy's analysis of Officer Craig sounded as good as any I could come up with and went on to describe to Timmy my unsettling meeting with Jim Suter's chilly and unforthcoming mother and brother.

"Jeez," Timmy said, "it does sound as if they know more than they're letting on.

Do you think they're protecting Jim, or even that they're in on it?"

It again. "I'm clueless. I was able to extract precisely nothing out of them. In fact, that's what made me suspicious, the care they took in chatting me up lengthily about themselves while revealing no fact at all about Jim."

"So I guess it's more urgent than ever that you track Suter down yourself."

"That's what I think."

The maitre d' now appeared briefly alongside our table and left behind two men.

The shorter and more compact of the two, a tidy, clear-skinned, strawberry-blond, preppy-looking man with a cream-colored sweater tied around his neck, said, "Don Stra-chey? I'm Martin Dormer."

There were introductions all around, with Dormer, and with Peter Vicknicki, a tall, thin man with a bushy, dark beard and small black eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He had on faded jeans and a well-worn black sweatshirt with SWEATSHIRT spelled out across the front.

I thought about the four former lovers of Jim Suter that I had laid eyes on-these two, Bud Hively, and Maynard-and saw no physical resemblance among any of them. I guessed that the men who turned Suter on were simply those men who were strongly attracted to him, and they had come in a broad spectrum of types.

As soon as we'd all been seated, with no preliminaries, Vicknicki asked, "Is there something really weird going on? The Post story on the quilt said a panel with Jim's name on it had been vandalized. And then somebody told me that a detective- I guess that's you-was asking around about Jim, who seems to have disappeared. At least, nobody we know has any idea where he is."

"And," Dormer added, "we heard that Maynard Sudbury, another one of Jim's exes, was shot in front of his house Saturday night and he's in the hospital in bad shape. Although I don't suppose there's any connection between that and Jim's disappearance and his name turning up on the AIDS panel. Is there?"

"We don't know if there's any connection," I was able to say honestly.

"I just hope there's not some bizarre conspiracy unfolding here," Vicknicki said, and I glanced at Timmy, who looked alert. "Jim Suter probably has more ex-lovers in Washington than all the Kennedys combined-a very large number of people fall into this category-and Sudbury was the second one of them inside of a year to be shot on the street on Capitol Hill. Maynard's expected to live, though, unlike poor Bryant Ulmer."

Timmy fidgeted with his water glass and said, "Who's Bryant Ulmer?"

"You haven't heard about Bryant?" Dormer asked. "Where are you guys from?"

"Albany, New York," Timmy said, and Dormer stared at him as if Timmy had announced that we were down for the weekend from Bleeding Gums, Ontario.

"Bryant was quite well known on the Hill," Dormer said, "and he was Jim's boyfriend for a month or so… a couple of years ago, I'd say. Then last winter Bryant was murdered. It was horrible. Bryant was shot in front of his house, too, about eight blocks from Maynard's. The police said it was a mugging and they never got whoever did it. But now with Maynard Sudbury getting shot the same way, some of us are beginning to wonder."

"Tell me again," Vicknicki put in, "what your connection is with Jim. Did you say his mother hired you to find him? From what I heard from Jim about Lila, I'm surprised she'd hire a gay detective. She's extremely homophobic and never wanted to know anything about Jim's personal life. You two are a couple, aren't you? You seem like you are." The deep black eyes behind Vicknicki's specs had hardened as he waited for one of us to answer.

I said, "We're partners, yes, and we're actually friends of Maynard's. The business about Mrs. Suter hiring us was a line to get you here. Sorry about that." "Oh. I see."

"We were with Maynard Saturday when he discovered the quilt panel for Jim, and he was upset and concerned. He wanted to find out what had happened.

Then he got shot, so we're investigating on our own. I am, at any rate. I'm a licensed private investigator in the state of New York." I took out my wallet and held up my license with its photo ID, and Dormer examined it with interest.

Vicknicki still looked skeptical. "You could have been honest with us."

"I can see that now," I said.

The waiter appeared, a slight Asian man in shiny black pants and a white shirt with a speck of cilantro on his sleeve. "Are you ready to order?"

"We haven't looked at the menu," Timmy said. "Sorry." "Take your time," the waiter replied, and zipped away. I said, "Martin, how come Bryant Ulmer was so well known on the Hill? Maybe we ought to be aware of who he was. Timothy and I do read the New York Times every day and when channel-surfing we pause from time to time at C-Span. But you can help us out by reminding us of exactly what Ulmer's claim to fame was."

"He was Burton Olds's chief of staff," Dormer said, then sat looking at me as if no further explanation were needed. I did recognize the name as that of an influential Republican congressman from Illinois who was chairman of an important House committee, although I couldn't remember which one. His name had also come up as the current employer of Alan McChesney, Betty Krumfutz's former chief of staff who was a friend of Jim Suter's boyfriend Jorge Ramos.

I said, "Olds is head of what? The banking committee?"

"Commerce," Dormer said. "And since Olds is both lazy and preoccupied with skirt-chasing-as men of Burton's generation in the House like to term it Bryant Ulmer pretty much ran not only the office but the congressional seat.

Bryant's murder was a real blow to Olds."

"Who," Vicknicki added, "is one of more than a few elected representatives serving in this city who possess, instead of a brain, an effective staff."

"Luckily for Olds," Dormer said, "Ulmer had a deputy who was able to step into the job when Bryant died. Alan McChesney is every bit as tough and capable as Bryant was. If not quite so nice."

Vicknicki said, "And like Bryant, Alan knows where all the bodies are buried." We stared at him, and Vicknicki added, "Figuratively speaking, I mean. I mean, I think I mean."

Timmy said, "Alan McChesney-isn't he another one of Jim Suter's exes? I've heard that name somewhere recently."

"They were briefly an item," Dormer said, "back when McChesney worked for Betty Krumfutz. Do you know who she is?"

"Yes, we do," I said.

Vicknicki said, "If it's beginning to sound as if Jim Suter fucked half the gay men on the Hill, that's probably about right. Between a half and two-thirds, I'd say."

Dormer nodded thoughtfully, as if the figure sounded within ballpark range.

"Which is not to say," Vicknicki went on, "that Jim ever slept with anybody more than, say, ten times."

"No." Dormer shook his head emphatically. "Ten tops. With me it was six."

"Me, too," Vicknicki said. "When Jim met you, it was, 'God, where have you been?' Then it was a week or so of rapture- with Jim's intense focus on you, and those eyes, and that hair- and then nothing. No thing. He'd never return your calls, and when you ran into him, he'd glance your way and say, 'Hi, nice to see you,' as if you were someone he'd once been introduced to at a reception at the National Bee Balm Association or whatever."

Timmy said, "Suter sounds perfectly infuriating. Neurotic and nasty and infuriating."

"I despise Jim Suter," Dormer suddenly sputtered, his face red with anger. "I am not a man who holds grudges normally. But I can honestly say I hate Jim Suter now and I will always hate Jim Suter. When I met Jim three years ago, I had just come out of a seven-year relationship. I was lonely and desperate and without hope. I felt like the breakup was my fault. Now I know it was both our faults, but at the time I was convinced I was a worthless piece of shit.

"Then I met Jim. And for exactly one week I felt human again. I was in love, and I felt loved. Until, that is, Jim stopped answering his phone with no explanation.

And when I camped outside his door until he came home late one Sunday night- with another guy I recognized as the day-shift supervisor at the Capitol South metro station-Jim just took me aside and said he really didn't appreciate being stalked. Stalked! He said he wasn't comfortable with people who were as obsessive as I was, but he wished me luck finding someone who was into that type of thing."

"Into obsession?" Timmy asked, incredulous. "Yes!"

Vicknicki said, "Martin's story might sound extreme, but mine was similar. Nearly identical, in fact."

"I guess it's safe to conclude," I said, "that Suter has a lot of people in his life whom he's hurt so badly that they might be compelled to get even."

"Revenge-wise," Dormer said, "Peter and I have to be just the tip of the iceberg."

"But you didn't submit the AIDS quilt panel as a kind of macabre joke to embarrass or hurt Suter?"

"Of course not. Don't be ridiculous," Vicknicki said quietly.

He paused and went on, "Martin and I are both HIV-positive. That's where we met, in an HIV support group. And while, yes, there's a lot of sardonic humor about HIV among people who are infected, it's not really a condition that anybody I know of would use against another person, even metaphorically.

Oh, Hitler, sure. Or Pol Pot. But not some ordinary piece of shit like Jim Suter.

Who, by the way, was not and is not, to the best of my knowledge, infected. Jim was always extremely careful, I think. I was, too, mostly. Mostly but not always."

"Do you know the old Comden and Green song 'Carried Away'?" Dormer asked.

" 'Carried away,'" Dormer sang mournfully, " 'carried away-I got carried away.'"

Timmy said, "I'm sorry to hear that you're paying such an absurdly high price for such an understandable kind of slip."

Vicknicki smiled ruefully. "Martin and I both have good insurance coverage. I'm at the Library of Congress and he's in congressional liaison at Labor. So we can afford the regimen with the full cocktail. Both our numbers are fair and improving, we feel good, and we're optimistic."

"We're lucky," Dormer said. "We've both lost a lot of friends over the last ten years."

"Us, too," Timmy said. "And the two of us only escaped by the skin of our teeth."

He meant the skin of my teeth but was too nice a guy to make the distinction among people who had no need to know of our complex history, and of our sexual philosophies that differed in the late seventies and early eighties and then largely merged in the late eighties.

Timmy said, "It sounds as if there must be almost as many Washington gay men eligible for Jim Suter-survivor support groups as there are for HIV support groups."

"As plagues go," Vicknicki said, "Jim's a minor one. And I don't suppose the Suter plague has spread through Asia and Africa."

"Do you have any idea where Jim might have disappeared to?" I asked.

"Everyone we've talked to, including Jim's family, seems stumped over his whereabouts."

"I heard back in the early summer that he had a Mexican boyfriend," Dormer said. "So Jim might have gone south of the border to spread heartbreak down there. Maybe it was part of the deal on NAFTA, which Bryant Ulmer and Alan McChesney both worked on: Mexico gets several hundred thousand jobs without having to commit much in the way of environmental protection, and as compensation it has to accept Jim Suter's exile. And when Mexican gay men start to complain about Suter, the government can tell them to go fuck themselves."

"I doubt that that last part would have to be included in any treaty," Vicknicki said.

I asked Dormer and Vicknicki if they thought Suter, who had close connections with former congresswoman Betty Krum-futz, could have been involved in the campaign-finance scandal that had brought her down. They both said they doubted it, that Jim had been closer to Mrs. Krumfutz's staff than to her, and that none of her aides had been implicated in the scam. That had been the dirty work of her shady husband, Nelson.

I told Dormer and Vicknicki that I'd been given the names of three other men Bill Walker, Jason Leibowicz, and Graham Houston-who were angry ex-lovers of Jim Suter's, and that I'd been having trouble tracking them down.

"I don't know about the other two," Vicknicki said, "but Graham Houston is dead."

"Was he shot?" Timmy asked.

"No, it was AIDS. He died about six months ago. I saw it in the Blade. I thought about him a lot after I read his obituary. I'd slept with Graham once about five years ago, and when I saw that he died, I wondered if maybe he infected me or maybe I infected him."

"I know Jason Leibowicz," Dormer said, "but I think I heard that he's in Uzbekistan or somewhere. He's State Department, and I'm pretty sure he was sent out to the ends of the earth a year or two back. As for Bill Walker, I don't know the name."

"If you're looking for people who loathe Jim," Vicknicki said, "the guy at the top of the list really ought to be Carmen LoBello. He was burned by Jim in Jim's characteristic fashion eight or ten months ago, and the last time I saw Carmen the wounds were still raw."

'Who's he?" I asked.

"Carmen's a drag queen and cabaret performer who used to be popular in local clubs. He specialized not in Barbra and Judy and Joan Crawford, but in doing D.C. power queens: Hillary, Nancy Reagan, Meg Greenfield, Liddy Dole. Donna Shalala would never have shown up at a performance, but I heard she got hold of a video of Carmen doing her one night and reportedly the Secretary of Health and Human Services was not amused."

Timmy said, "This is some inside-the-Beltway esoterica I've never heard about."

"Carmen was really brilliant. He had one routine where he did Cokie Roberts, then Nina Totenberg, and Linda Wertheimer."

"I'm truly impressed," Timmy said. "This is not the Washington I knew when I went to school here in the sixties. This Carmen LoBello would have been considered far ahead of his time at the Georgetown Grill."

"But then when his affair with Jim ended last winter," Vick-nicki went on,

"something seemed to snap in Carmen. People who know him said sometimes he was enraged-kicking and throwing things and cursing Suter's name. And then other times Carmen was depressed and withdrawn. Anyway, Jim's dumping him apparently left Carmen completely unhinged, and his cabaret act changed almost overnight. He stopped doing Hillary and Cokie and Barbara Boxer, and instead he just did one bizarre character over and over again, a surreal composite of two famous Washington figures that he called G. Gordon Liddy Dole.

"It was basically Liddy Dole, of course-who'd been one of Carmen's audiences' favorites-with the sugarcoated Southern faux-sincerity and the hairsprayed soul and the pretty red power frock. But suddenly Liddy also had a big slab of a mustache and smoked a fat cigar, and she ranted about Vince Foster, and about nuking China. "Carmen never gave a reason, but he absolutely refused to do anybody but this one weird character over and over again. Audiences soon got tired of it, and even Carmen's die-hard fans gave up on him. Carmen was fired from Starkers, the club where he worked, and the last time I heard, he still had his day job at the Bureau of Mines, but he wasn't performing at all anymore. I know that Carmen still explodes into a tirade whenever Jim Suter's name comes up. So if you're looking for people who hate Suter, Carmen should move swiftly to the top of your list." I said, "LoBello can be reached at the Bureau of Mines?" "That's where I'd try first," Vicknicki said. "A friend of Carmen's said his home number's been changed and is now unlisted."

I asked Vicknicki for the names of a couple of LoBello's closest friends, and I wrote them down.

Dormer said, "The TV news also reported that the quilt panel with Jim's name on it had been vandalized-parts of it ripped off. Do you guys think that has anything to do with Jim's disappearance and two of his ex-boyfriends getting shot? It's hard to imagine Carmen being mixed up in anything violent. But he's always been a strange man. Creative but strange."

Vicknicki and Dormer both watched me carefully as I replied, "I don't know yet what to make of any of these violent and destructive events. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if it turned out to be a string of ugly coincidences."

Dormer considered this gravely, Vicknicki continued to gaze at me with a look of penetrating curiosity, and Timmy gave me his droll, skeptical once-over. Lucky for me, the waiter reappeared and, a little more insistent than he'd been the first time, asked if we were ready to order yet. We made some snap decisions, none of which we came to regret.

Between the soup course and the entrees, I excused myself, found a pay phone, and tracked down Chondelle Dolan. I asked her about the murder of Bryant Ulmer and what she knew about Alan McChesney. Ulmer died in an unsolved street robbery on a Capitol Hill side street the previous January, Dolan recalled. But it wasn't a case she had worked on, so she said she would have to look into the file and check on the investigation's current status.

Alan McChesney, Dolan said, was a formidable if not particularly well-liked man on the Hill. As Burton Olds's chief of staff, JMcChesney was also one of the most influential homosexuals in official Washington, not counting, of course, those six or eight or ten gay or lesbian representatives and senators who were either un-, discreetly, or pathologically closeted. I asked if IMcChesney's moving into Ulmer's job after his death had had any political, professional, or personal repercussions that Dolan knew of. She said she didn't know but she'd check.

Then Dolan said, "Donald, you don't want to hear this, but you better know it. Ray Craig had you tailed out to Silver Spring earlier. Ray stayed with Timothy at GW, and an officer I know named Filbert Furlong tailed you to the apartment of Mrs.

Lila Suter."

"Tell Filbert he does good work. I had no idea. What's he look like?"

"Oh, he's the invisible man."

"I'm calling from the Bangkok Flower, up from Dupont Circle. Is Filbert skulking in here somewhere, wearing a camouflage of peanut sauce and tiny prawns?"

"No, he's off duty now. It's probably some other officer there amongst the rice noodles."

"Do you have any clearer idea of why Craig is so suspicious of Timmy and me?"

"Wish I did. Like I said, it's probably a failure of imagination. But I've got other bad news for you, too, Donald."

"What's that?"

"Ray's been talking to a captain he's tight with by the name of Milton Kingsley.

Kingsley is probably well aware that Ray and another Caucasian lieutenant do imitations of the captain that are what you really have to call unflattering. But these two use each other and need each other, so the captain puts up with Ray.

But now, a buddy of mine in administration told me today, Captain Kingsley is taking a trip. Papers have been processed for a plane ticket and expenses for-I hate to say it."

"Don't tell me."

"Yep. Cancun, Mexico."

"When?"

"Wednesday."

When I got back to the table, Timmy, Dormer, and Vicknicki were busy conjuring up conspiracy theories-most of them political and far-fetched-that might explain the connections between Bryant Ulmer's shooting, Maynard's, and the Jim Suter quilt panel and vandalism. And Dormer and Vicknicki didn't even know about the mysterious appearance of Betty Krumfutz or a Betty Krumfutz impostor at the quilt panel and the fact that Suter met his Mexican boyfriend, Jorge, through Alan McChesney, who had once been Mrs. Krumfutz's chief of staff and, following Bryant Ulmer's violent death, was now Burton Olds's.

I added nothing to this free-form speculation and pooh-poohed much of it. But I listened to and considered all of it. And by the time the conversation had concluded, I needed to ask Timmy for two of the aspirin he always carried with him-four tiny pills in a small plastic vial in the inner recesses of his jacket pocket, as if he were a spy on a dangerous mission deep inside enemy territory. I also tried to figure out who in the restaurant might be a D.C. plainclothes police officer watching us-and listening? — but I gave up after failing to narrow the field to fewer than seventeen possibilities.