Strachey's folly

Chapter 16

The Bureau of Mines, now an office of the United States Department of the Interior, on C Street, NW, seemed like an unlikely spot for a terrorist attack. But after the Oklahoma City catastrophe, any U.S. government agency had to be considered fair game for ideological mad bombers, so the Interior building was well guarded. I never made it past the uniformed security detail in the lobby, but I was permitted the use of a phone to speak with the department's personnel office-"human resources" in the current puffed-up lingo of big government and big business.

Carmen LoBello was employed by the Bureau of Mines, I was told, but when I dialed LoBello's extension a woman answered and said Carmen wasn't in. He had taken a "personal day"-not yet labeled a "human needs day"-and he was expected back at work the next day, Wednesday. I'd be en route to the Yucatan then, but now, at any rate, I knew where to find LoBello when I got back, should I still think I needed to, after I had met with Jim Suter.

It was midmorning, and Timmy had taken the metro out to National Airport. He was to pick up my passport, carried down from Albany by a USAir flight attendant who was the boyfriend of a colleague of Timmy's at the legislature who had a key to our house. Then Timmy was headed over to GW, where he hoped Maynard would be in good enough shape for his first conversation since the shooting on Saturday night.

I was to meet two of Jim Suter's friends for lunch-the ones whose names I'd gotten from Bud Hively-with the hope that I might gather information about Suter's whereabouts in Mexico that was more specific than what I had pieced together from Hively and via Timmy's telephone trickery with Betty Krumfutz.

First, though, I figured I'd drop by Congressman Burton Olds's office and see what I could find out from another Suter ex-lover whose name kept cropping up, former Betty Krumfutz chief of staff Alan McChesney.

Unlike the Capitol and other nearby government edifices, the Sam Rayburn House Office Building wasn't so much monumental as monstrous. This big gray, graceless heap of marble slabs on Independence Avenue was about as welcoming as a federal penitentiary, and its immense, bleak corridors suggested not democratic representation but crude authority. I made it through the metal detectors and followed a guard's directions up to Congressman Burton Olds's suite of offices on the second floor, where, when I asked for Alan McChesney, the receptionist asked if he was expecting me.

I said no, but I thought Mr. McChesney would be interested in speaking with me about a missing person. The receptionist, an attractive green-eyed redhead who smelled of frangipani blossoms, spoke briefly on the phone. Then she said to me, "I'm sorry, but Mr. McChesney is with the congressman just now."

"Which one?"

"Which congressman is he with?"

"Right."

"With Congressman Olds," she said, and gave me an odd look.

"Do you have any idea how long he'll be in there? I'm sure everybody here is on a tight schedule, but I won't take more than five or ten minutes of Mr.

McChesney's time."

"I can leave word that you stopped in, Mr. Strachey, and if you'd like to leave a phone number where we can reach you, we can probably set something up."

"I guess I'll hang around and hope for the best. If you mention Jim Suter's name, that should speed up the process. Would you mind giving that a try?"

The woman shifted uncomfortably-was I merely rude or a dangerous loony? and then she got back on the phone. I studied the walls festooned with plaques and citations-from Illinois business and civic groups, from petroleum, chemical, and farm organizations. There were dozens of framed photos, in which Burton Olds, tall, muscular, and pinch-faced, was pictured with a variety of GOP present and former Illinois and national officeholders. Here he was with George and Barbara Bush, over there with Ron and Nancy in palmier days. In other shots Olds posed soberly alongside a grave-faced, bearded man I first thought might be the Reagan surgeon general C. Everett Koop, but who, on closer inspection, turned out to be the mechanical Abraham Lincoln at Disney World.

Goofy was discernible in the dim background. There were also photos of Olds shaking hands with several foreign leaders, two of them Mexican: former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the current president, Ernesto Zedillo.

I seated myself and picked up a copy of Time just as a door opened and a beefy, square-faced man appeared. The receptionist indicated to him with a nod that I was the schedule interrupter.

"I understand you want to talk to Alan McChesney about Jim Suter." His tone wasn't hostile but it was far from friendly.

"Yes, if I may, please."

"Alan has a few minutes he can spare you. Follow me. I'm Ian Williamson."

I sensed that I was expected to know who Williamson was-as in "Hello, I'm Count Leo Tolstoy"-but neither his name nor his face was familiar.

I followed Williamson through a warren of cubicles and small offices and into a larger office with a window overlooking Independence Avenue and the Capitol grounds. Williamson rapped twice on a polished wooden door, which opened immediately, and a man strode out, quickly and quietly closing the door behind him. He brusquely indicated a straight-backed chair-the petitioner's seat that directly faced the broad, heavy desk that he seated himself behind. Then he said to me coldly, "Is this some kind of shakedown?"

"Nope."

"I hope not."

"I'm a private investigator, not a criminal."

"I've met people who are both."

"So have I. But I'm not one of them."

"Mm-hmm."

McChesney gazed at me appraisingly while Williamson leaned against the doorframe, his thick arms folded. McChesney was forty-five or so with a chiseled face that was as hard and smooth as polished stone. His trim body had been carefully packaged in a black silk suit, and he wore a necktie with a subtle-hued, kaleidoscopic design that I suspected might reflect his personality as well as his politics.

"What makes you think I might have criminal designs?" I asked. "Have I got that reputation around the United States Capitol?"

"No," McChesney said, "you have no reputation whatever around the United States Capitol. But Jim Suter's name means trouble, and you bullied your way in here using Suter's name as an implied threat. I'd like to know what you meant by that. I haven't got much time to spare, so let's have it."

"I'm trying to locate Suter. I'm a private investigator, and a client, whose name I can't divulge, wants to contact Suter. It's rumored that he's in Mexico, and since you're reported to have introduced Jim to his current boyfriend, your friend Jorge Ramos, I thought you might know where the two of them are."

McChesney quickly shook his head and said, "You should go into politics, Strachey. 'It is rumored… you are reported… " You spew out this squid's-ink cloud of innuendo, and I'm supposed to tremble and gulp and confess all. Do you really think I'm that easy?"

"I hoped you might be."

"You're from-where?"

"Albany, New York."

"That's a grown-up political town. You should know better."

"Let's try this another way, then, that doesn't insult your intelligence, McChesney. You mentioned that Jim Suter's name means trouble. Which trouble did you have in mind?"

"Jim Suter is a sadist," McChesney said without hesitation. "He tortures men emotionally by seducing and abandoning them. He did it to me and hundreds of others, and if you meet him, he'll more than likely do it to you. I don't know if you're straight or gay, but either way he'll charm the pants off you-figuratively if you're heterosexual, literally if you're homosexual. Then, when you're hooked and you will be, you will be- he'll turn his back on you and never take you seriously again, or ever speak to you again if he can get away with it. Jim is like some Christian-right caricature of a sick, cold-blooded, compulsively promiscuous American homosexual man. And if that's not trouble by any definition, I don't know what is."

Williamson, still leaning on the doorframe with his arms folded, looked a little sickened by McChesney's description of Suter, which left no room for sympathy for Suter's current alleged plight-which, in any case, I was still honor-bound not to mention.

I said, "I am gay, and I stand forewarned-by you and by others. But if Suter is so reprehensible, McChesney, how come you introduced him to your friend Jorge Ramos? That doesn't sound very nice."

"No, it wasn't nice," McChesney said icily. "Nor was it meant to be nice. I'll spare you the sordid details, but please take my word for it that Jorge Ramos and Jim Suter deserve each other. Getting them together wasn't as horrible a revenge as I've sometimes fantasized about for Jim. But for the time being it will have to do.

Jorge and I, I should add, are no longer friends. I cut all my ties with Jorge months ago, when I discovered exactly what he was."

"Which was what?"

McChesney just looked at me.

"Was Jorge also an emotional sadist of some kind?"

"You could put it that way," McChesney said, and then his mouth clamped shut.

"Is it true that Suter is Mexico?"

"I wouldn't know because I haven't seen or been in touch with Jim Suter in months-a good year probably. But if Jorge got him. down to Cancun and got his hooks in him, Jim may well have stayed. Even if after three days he and Jorge had had enough of each other, romantically speaking."

"What kind of hooks does Jorge have that he gets into people?"

"He's a hustler and a scam artist. Most of it's quasi-legitimate, but I suspect a lot of it's not-oversold vacation-condo time-share operations and the like. Drugs?

Probably, once in a while, if a deal is foolproof. It's where the big easy money is made in Mexico. Every year forty billion dollars' worth of recreational narcotics passes through Mexico from South America to North America's fun-loving addicts and glamour seekers. And over half that forty billion ends up in the bank accounts of Mexican dealers and officials they've bought off. Jorge would not be one to let such an opportunity pass by, however cautiously he might go about it. He's always got money and easy access to the best of the good life on the Mexican Caribbean coast, and Jim Suter would go for that, I have reason to believe. Jim never made much as a writer, I don't think, so Jorge's lifestyle and circle of friends would be a definite draw for Jim-as it has been for so many men."

"Yourself included?"

McChesney didn't flinch at the insult. He just smiled a little sadly and said, "No, I was interested in Jorge's ass, not his expensive tastes."

"And he was interested in yours?"

"For a while, yes. Then his interests shifted and things got a little rough between us. Before I broke things off."

"Care to elaborate on that?"

"To you? No."

Williamson stood shaking his head with distaste, as if he knew the McChesney-Jorge story, and he, too, found it too ugly to contemplate out loud.

I asked McChesney, "Where did you meet Jorge?" "In Cancun." "On vacation?"

"Yes, it's a gorgeous piece of Caribbean real estate. Have you been there?"

"I visited the Yucatan about ten years ago and enjoyed it. Does your boss go there, too? I saw his picture outside with some Mexican leaders."

"Those pictures were taken here in Washington. My former employer, Representative Krumfutz, is the real Mexico maven. She taught Spanish in the Log Heaven, Pennsylvania, high school before she ran for office, and she used to lead summer student tours of Mexico and during school vacations. She really knows the place and was the one who first got me interested in it, and I fell for Mexico the way a lot of people do-the quiet friendliness, the mix of traditional and modern cultures, the inexpensive comfort, the climate. My visits to the Yucatan, unhappily, have been curtailed since my falling out with Jorge. If you're tracking down Jim Suter, it looks as if you may be getting to Mexico well before I do, if that's where he is. And if, that is, your anonymous client is prepared to finance your trip to Cancun in search of Mr. Suter. What are you supposed to do when you find him? Shoot him?"

"No. Why do you ask that?"

"It's an impulse a lot of men have probably felt toward Jim Suter," McChesney said with no discernible emotion. "To take out a contract on him."

"I've no assassinations on my resume."

"You're to be commended. Incidentally-or not so incidentally-I see that Jim made the news."

"That's right."

"Somebody put him in the AIDS quilt."

"Yes."

"What an insensitive thing to do. Not to Jim necessarily, but it sullies the quilt. A lot of dead friends of mine have panels in the quilt. So as much as I dislike Jim Suter, I think this is an extremely tasteless way for anybody to hurt him."

"I agree. I understand that you lost another friend last winter. Not to AIDS, but in a murder-Bryant Ulmer, your predecessor in this job. Or wasn't Ulmer a friend?"

"Bryant was not only a friend but a mentor. I'd been his deputy for two years. I miss Bryant very much, professionally and personally. I moved over here with Burton after Betty left office. Representative Krumfutz's career was fucked by her dim-witted husband, Nelson-and, I think, that ignorant cunt he's shacking up with in Engineville. Ever been up to Central Pennsylvania, Strachey?"

"Just passing through."

"It's beautiful country, but culturally it's a wasteland. If you're stuck up there for a month, as I was once, don't, say, go looking for tickets to the opera. Friday-night high school football, yes. The Ring cycle? Forget it."

"Unlike Washington, of course. Home of La Scala. Or is that someplace else?"

"We take the Metroliner to New York," McChesney said, and Williamson nodded.

So these two were a couple?

"It's the same for us in Albany," I said, as if I'd ever set foot in the Metropolitan Opera more than twice. I hoped McChesney didn't start palavering about Wagner. What had happened to his tight schedule?

To my relief, he said, "I didn't like the way you bullied your way in here, Strachey, but I don't mind having been able to offer you my views on Jim Suter-unhelpful as I've been in locating him. I haven't got a current address for Jorge. I understand he's got some new place south of Cancun somewhere. So if Jim is with him, you'll have to find someone with more up-to-date information than I've got. But if I've added to your knowledge of Jim's foul history and rotten character, I'm happy to have been of assistance in that regard."

"Thank you."

"I've been far more forthcoming than anything I know about you suggests you deserve, Strachey. Now it's your turn. Who's your client?"

"I can't say."

"I could find out if I badly wanted to."

"How?"

"Ask around. I already knew you were in town looking for Jim."

"Well, go ahead. Ask around. That's up to you."

McChesney studied me for a moment, then said, "I might do that." Then he stood up, and as I stood, McChesney said, "If you go down to the Yucatan, I hope you have an enjoyable time, as you say you did ten years ago. But if you locate Jim Suter, the chances are, you won't. He's poison. And for Christ's sake, don't let him get you into bed. You wouldn't know what hit you. Not for the first week, I should say. That's bliss. But after a week or so, Jim Suter is Satan and life with him is life in hell."

I told McChesney I'd be extra careful. I thanked him and left. Williamson accompanied me to the corridor, and I made my own way out of the Rayburn Building and into a cool fall drizzle.