Strachey's folly

Chapter 29

Twelve hours later, back in Washington, I found Timmy, as I hoped and expected I would, at Maynard's bedside. Timmy had now been at GW, either in Maynard's room or in the nearby lounge, for over forty-eight hours. Timmy wasn't his freshest. He was rumpled, needed airing, and had a two-day growth of beard. But he was as happy to see me intact as I was to find him safe and unharmed by the Ramos gang.

I ran through the entire story once for Timmy and May-nard. They listened, rapt-all but goggle-eyed-and they rarely interrupted me until I got to the part about my half-day transit through Cuba, about which Maynard wanted to know every last detail.

"I've got to track Jim down," Maynard said. "Jeez, what a story!"

"I think he'll be elusive."

"Oh, I can do it. I'll find him."

Timmy said to me, "So?"

"Uh-huh. I hear what you're thinking."

"Not to rub it in or anything."

"No, it would be unlike you to do that."

"But… I guess I was right about the conspiracy. Donald, you did have me wondering a few times if I wasn't just conjuring this stuff up-wild imaginings fed by my early historically suspect religious education. But I wasn't imagining much of it, was I?"

"No, Timothy, you were basically on the mark, conspiracy-theory-wise. I was wrong, and I apologize for… for living in the past. The recent past, but still the past. But now, as people keep explaining to me-Chondelle Dolan, then Suter-everything old is new again, in certain depressing ways."

"This plot does sound sixteenth-century Italian," Timmy said, "despite the contemporary terminology. I can almost imagine Machiavelli urging princes to maximize their possibilities for interface."

"So, what," Maynard asked, "are you going to do with the incriminating evidence Suter gave you? Incriminating, that is, if J i m didn't make all that stuff up about McChesney and Burton Olds and the Ramos family. And, of course, incriminating if the pe'(›ple making the big bucks off NAFTA don't immediately hatch an even more insidious plot to cover up the original one, and none of this ever comes out."

"At the airport," I said, "I made photocopies of the documents, as well as Jim's letter to me, minus personal references. I also phoned several interested parties, official and unofficial, and asked them to meet us here in this room at ten o'clock. Since it's a police matter and you're feeling so fit, Maynard, the head nurse said she thought that would be okay. I wasn't able to reach Bud Hively at the Blade, but Dana Mosel is coming, Chondelle Dolan, and of course the inevitable Ray Craig."

"Craig isn't a part of the conspiracy?" Timmy asked nervously.

"No, I think he likes to follow us around because he's in love with us. He doesn't know it yet, but it's either that or he's simply incompetent. Anyway, the Ramoses' man in the MPD is this Captain Milton Kingsley."

With that, Craig appeared in the doorway of Maynard's loom, reeking, and fifteen minutes early. He must have heard what I said, but he did not react and just flopped onto the empty bed next to Maynard's and glared at me.

Chondelle Dolan soon arrived, then Dana Mosel from the I'osl. They a ll listened with fierce concentration and copious eyebrow-raising and jaw-dropping as I retold the story of the conspiracy to fix the NAFTA vote and the murders and the attempted murders it had led to directly and indirectly. Mosel took several pages of notes.

After I finished my narrative and passed out copies of Suter's annotated lists, Mosel asked for clarification on a number of points, to which Craig, in a surly tone, objected each time. "This is a matter for law enforcement," he snapped,

"not for the media."

I ignored these pro forma protests and said to Mosel, after she'd run out of questions, "I believe, Dana, if I'm not mistaken, that you've got reporters and editors over at the Post with long experience in following money and paper trails. True?"

"We sure do."

"Well, I now offer this material from Jim Suter to you and to your paper free of charge."

"We couldn't accept it any other way. Thank you."

"What about the U.S. attorney's office?" Dolan asked. "Shouldn't they get a copy, too? A lot of the violations here are federal."

I asked, "Would you mind, Chondelle, providing copies of these papers to the feds first thing in the morning?"

"I surely will do that," she said.

Craig snorted, "This is not Lieutenant Dolan's case! Lieutenant Dolan has no official connection with this case, and if anybody goes to the U.S. attorney's office tomorrow, I’ll do it!"

"Will you?" I asked.

"You're goddamn right I will. I'd love to nail Milton Kings-ley to the wall. I've never understood how a man on a captain's salary can drive a Ferrari. I've had my suspicions about that man for years. I'll be on the feds' doorstep with this at eight A.M."

Dolan shrugged. "That's okay with me, Lieutenant."

I suggested that Craig might also try to serve as the MPD liaison to the Log Heaven and Engineville, Pennsylvania, police departments, and that way he would get a free trip somewhere nice, too. I didn't offer to accompany Craig to Central Pennsylvania, but I did plan to make one more trip there myself. This was to reassure Betty Krumfutz that whatever front-page news stories included her and hei late husband's names in the coming months, none would mention her role-playing variations on Mayan ritual. sacrifices. Only I knew about that now that Nelson Krimilutz's photo album had presumably gone up in flames with his I'lujjineville house-and I planned on 100 percent discretion when it came to certain noncriminal but nonetheless prohlc'MiMlical matters that had cropped up inadvertently in re-crni weeks, including some of rny own.

Alter Mosel left to catch a couple of Post editors before they retired lor the night, and Dolan went to meet the date she'd left downstairs in the hospital lobby, and Ray Craig went off to arrange for a guard-instead of a tail-so that Timmy and I could safely return to our hotel room for the night, we said so long to Maynard.

"Thanks for clearing all this up, Don," he said, "and for giving me an incentive to go to Cuba. I've been wanting to write about Cuba for years, but I couldn't think of anything to say about it that hasn't already been written. Maybe I'll go down there and the story will turn out to be different-you always have to be ready to let that happen. But it sure sounds as if the Cuban story is, it's the next Cancun."

Tiinmy said, "Don't eat too many black beans while you're down I here," and the two of them yukkeel it up over that.

We left Maynard for the night, met Craig at the nurses' station, and accompanied him down to his MPD car, parked, naturally, in the fire lane. Timmy and I held hands because we were happy lo be reunited, and also because I wanted to show Craig how much we meant to each other, and to let him know that if he was in love with us, he was going to have to quit smoking mid have all his clothes dry-cleaned before we would ever consider having him move in with us. I explained this to Timmy after we were back in our hotel room on Capitol Hill, and he said he understood that I was trying to be funny.

I told Timmy again how gratified and relieved I was to be back with him, and to be alone with him for the first time in days. I said I actually liked his two-day growth of beard-I'd never known Timmy to go this long without shaving-and he gave me a funny look and said, "I had a razor with me at the hospital, but I decided not to shave."

"You did? How come?"

"I'm growing a mustache."

"You? A mustache?"

He just kept giving me such an odd look, not entirely friendly either, and I thought, Oh hell.