Strachey's folly

Chapter 6

Using the pretext of having to hurry back to the hospital and check on Maynard, we were able to extricate ourselves from Craig within twenty minutes. He told us he wanted to hear our narratives of the shooting a second time. He said sometimes details floated back into memory during the retelling of a traumatic event a day later. This was true, but with Craig the line sounded phony. Again, he sat jiggling his loafer and looking both suspicious of and mildly disgusted with everything we had to say. Then, with barely a word uttered, Craig got up and left. This time, he had asked about Mexico only twice instead of six times.

"What is it with that creep?" Timmy muttered after Craig shut the door behind him.

"I don't know," I said, "but I think it's time we talked to somebody we can trust who'll at least be in a position to offer an informed opinion on Craig-and maybe everything else that's happened. Don't you know somebody in Frankie Balducci's office?" Frankie Balducci was the openly gay congressman from Boston who'd been a relentless voice of sanity on gay matters in an institution where understanding of, and attitudes toward, homosexuality had not yet, as the twenty-first century approached, advanced far into the eighteenth.

Timmy said, "Bob Bittner. He was in my class at Georgetown."

"Can you call him? Don't tell him why, but just ask him if he can find a D.C. police officer who's cleaner than Mother Teresa."

"That treacherous, headline-grabbing, reactionary old crone?"

"All right, then. Cleaner than… than any other cop in D.C. Gay might help, too, closeted or not."

Timmy reached his old friend, who agreed to try to track down an indisputably clean cop, no questions asked, and he said he'd get back to Timmy in fifteen minutes. I showered and Timmy went downstairs for a newspaper, and then Bittner called back. The officer we should talk to, he said, was Detective Lieutenant Chondelle Dolan.

After he hung up, Timmy said, "Bob says she's gay, she's smart, and she's squeaky-clean. Dolan is disinclined to rock any department boats, and she goes along and gets along with the mayor and his crowd of leeches and scam artists. But Bob says a woman he knows, Rain Terry, was once involved with Dolan for several months, and Terry swears Dolan is both one of the most uncorruptible people she's ever met and one of the most discreet."

"That's our cop."

"Bob wasn't sure she'd talk to us. Dolan is one for going through channels, he said."

"But if she's that clean, I'll bet our story will pique her interest, at least."

While I dialed Dolan's number, Timmy walked over and yanked open the door to the corridor. Assured that no one was lurking there, he shut the door and came back and sat on the bed while I waited for an answer at Dolan's home.

I was about to hang up when a low, groggy voice came on the line. "Yeah, hello."

"Lieutenant Dolan?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm Donald Strachey, a private investigator, and a friend of a friend of a friend of Rain Terry, who suggested I call you."

"Oh, Rain did, huh?" She sounded as if I had wakened her from a long, drugged sleep.

"I'm looking for the cleanest, most discreet police officer in Washington to talk to about, among other mystifying events, the shooting last night of a gay man by the name of Maynard Sudbury on E Street, Southeast. There may be more to the attack than the police have been told, and I need to bounce some of what I know off somebody in the department I know I can trust. Rain told Bob Bittner, of Frankie Balducci's office, that you are that person. Can we meet somewhere and I can run what I know by you?"

A silence. "Give me your number. I'll call you back."

I recited our hotel and room numbers and hung up. I said, "She's checking on Bittner with Terry and on us with Bittner."

I glanced through the Post — Bob Dole was threatening to take off the kid gloves in his second debate with Clinton-and Timmy checked the corridor again and then looked out the window for suspicious characters two stories below on Second Street, SE.

Within minutes Chondelle Dolan had called back and agreed to meet Timmy and me at a Pennsylvania Avenue bagel shop in half an hour. Meanwhile, I checked GW again to verify that Maynard was still stable. He was. With Timmy's concurrence, I went ahead and phoned a number in Tilton, Illinois, and reached, as I hoped I would, old Peace Corps ties aside, May-nard's brother. Neither Timmy nor I wanted to be the one to notify Maynard's parents, if we could avoid it. Edwin Sudbury said he would do that, and he said he and his wife would leave for Washington as soon as they could make travel arrangements.

"Was it a mugging?" Sudbury asked anxiously.

I said the motive for the attack had not yet been determined, but that given Washington's robbery rate, a mugging was what a lot of people seemed to suspect it might have been. Seated nearby, Timmy rolled his eyes.

"You got ID?" she said.

"Sure." I showed her my New York State PI license, and Timmy presented his card identifying him as the chief legislative aide to New York State assemblyman Myron Lipshutz.

"Bob Bittner says you guys have your idiosyncrasies but I hat you're responsible enough citizens, and I should take you seriously even if what you have to say might sound a little gonzo at first."

"That sums us up," I said.

Dolan looked at me with no hint of enthusiasm but with large dark eyes that were interested and alert. In her midthirties, she had a big, handsome Ibo face with the kind of sharply ridged, ample lips that I'd always found deeply erotic on black men and pleasing in a less hormonal way on black women. Dolan's shoulder-length hair, done in a near-flip, was black and gleaming, and her eye shadow was the same shade of cobalt blue as her two-piece silk suit and blouse. Had it not been for her bulky muscularity, she'd have looked less like a cop than a prosecuting attorney, or a regional administrator of the Department of Labor. She was both cool and formidable-I guessed that even in Marion Barry's age of racial payback in Washington, her rise through the police ranks had not been easy-and it looked as if we had lucked out in hooking up with Chondelle

Dolan.

Timmy fidgeted with his bagel and said, "Do you mind if we look at your ID, too, Ms. Dolan?"

"No problem," she said, and flipped open a black leather wallet so that we could examine her name and badge.

"Thanks," Timmy said. "We're nervous-I am, anyway- and — when you hear about all this grotesque stuff, I think you'll understand why."

"Uh-huh. Well, you go ahead and tell me your story. I've got plenty of time. I've got a lunch date at one, but till then I'm interested to hear what you got to say about this shooting you mentioned."

I began to speak, but Timmy's eyes darted quickly around the bagel shop at the other customers, and he cut me off with, "You used to date Rain Terry? I just met her a few times and she seemed awfully nice."

"Yeah, Rain's a peach." Dolan picked up on Timmy's antsi-ness and leaned closer and lowered her voice. "Rain's got two kids now with her partner-two little boys. Did you know that?"

"No, I didn't," Timmy said.

"That's not for me," Dolan said in a matter-of-fact way. "I got nine brothers and sisters, seven of them younger than me. Somebody else wants to overpopulate the world, fine. Me? Uh-uh."

"I'm the father of a child in Edensburg, New York, north of Albany," Timmy said, and with an accustomed gesture whipped out his wallet. "Two lesbian friends asked me to be the father of their child-via artificial insemination, of course and it turns out I love it. This is Erica Osborne-Kotlowitz."

Dolan glanced briefly at the photo of a tiny person in a white dress and said,

"Looks human to me, Timothy. Good for you, honey."

"She'll be seventeen months old this Thursday," he said.

"Uh-huh."

I said, "Chondelle-may I call you Chondelle?"

"Yes, you may."

"Chondelle, to get to the point, a close friend of Timmy's was shot and seriously wounded in front of his house on E Street, Southeast, last night."

"Maynard Sudbury is his name," Timmy put in, leaning close to Dolan. "We were in the Peace Corps together in India in the midsixties. A poultry development project. Few of us had any real experience with farming of any kind. We were what the Peace Corps calls BAGs-B.A. generalists. The Peace Corps phi-losophy at that time was-"

"Timmy, Chondelle has a date in a couple of hours, so maybe we need to just explain to her what happened yesterday and last night and postpone the theories of rural development until a later date."

"Yeah," she said, "I'd love to hear about you and your friends raising chickens.

But let's save that."

I looked around, and nobody was seated at the tables adjacent to ours, and none of the Sunday-morning coffee drinkers and Post readers in the shop showed any sign of being aware of us at all. I said, "Timmy is afraid that the shooting and a number of other disturbing events yesterday are interconnected-part of an extensive Robert Ludlum-style conspiracy. I don't agree, but his suspicions are not entirely off-the-wall. It was a pretty wild twelve hours yesterday." Then I laid it all out: the first un-expurgated version of Saturday's events spoken out loud by Timmy or me to anyone.

While Timmy shifted uneasily in his seat, I described to Dolan Maynard's shock at discovering an AIDS quilt panel for Jim Suter; the mysterious appearance at the panel by a woman Maynard recognized as former congresswoman Betty Krumfutz; the letter from Suter warning Maynard that Suter's life was in danger and the admonition not to reveal Suter's whereabouts to anyone, especially not to the D.C. cops or to any people on "the Hill"; the reported vandalism of the Suter panel on the quilt; the brutal shooting; the ransacking of Maynard's house while Timmy and I were at the hospital; the unnerving multiple appearances by D.C. police detective Ray Craig.

Dolan listened to this recitation carefully and with a look of concern and growing distaste. When I mentioned Suter's warning not to reveal any of this story to the D.C. cops, Dolan raised a carefully drawn eyebrow but did not react otherwise.

When I had finished, she said, "I'm sorry about your friend. I hope he makes it.

Firearms do terrible damage to human bodies, but at GW they deal with these injuries all the time. So he's in good hands."

"And Maynard's resilient," Timmy said. "He's survived things almost as bad as getting shot-parasites, plagues, guerrilla wars, mobs, you name it. So there's reason to hope he can withstand this attack, too."

"Maynard sounds like a real tough bird."

"So, what do you think?" Timmy said. "Am I crazy, or is there really something big going on here? Something… something interrelated with… with a lot of people involved in it?" He took a quick look over his shoulder, as if he might catch another patron of the coffee shop in the act of pointing a directional microphone our way, or aiming a bamboo pipe with a poisoned blow dart.

Dolan said, "No, it's not crazy to consider the possibility that there's a connection between everything that went on yesterday. That's not crazy at all. It does sound to me like it's more than a run of bad luck."

"But," I said, "Timmy may be letting his imagination roam a bit too freely, don't you think? Such as imagining, to cite just one example, that some of the GW hospital staff may be out to do Maynard in, and the same for large segments of the D.C.

Metropolitan Police Department. I think he needs to be reassured on these points, among a number of others."

Dolan sighed heavily and said, "Look, I gotta make a phone call. I told my date I'd check in with her around now. Come on with me while I make a quick call, okay? There's a phone down at the corner, by Second."

Before we could question Dolan, she stood up and we quickly got up, too, and followed her out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. None of us had finished our coffee, but Dolan paid no attention to that.

As we walked up Pennsylvania toward the Library of Congress, Dolan looked straight ahead and said, "I just wanted to get us out of there. Don't turn around, don't look back, but another plainclothes officer was in the coffee shop. He came in right after I did and sat three tables behind you all. He was too far away to hear much of anything you said, but after you told me what you told me, Donald, I thought, why is this man sitting here? The officer's name is Ewell Flower, and he works under Ray Craig."

Timmy said, "Oh, God," and he appeared to be putting a lot of effort into not looking over his shoulder, as was I.

"Why not let's walk on over to the Capitol," Dolan said. She led us across Pennsylvania, past the library, across the Capitol grounds with their beautifully kept greenery and their antiter-rorist reinforced-concrete barricades-would missiles with tactical nuclear warheads explode out of the bushes in the event of attack? — and around the south wing of the great building. The Capitol looked soft and creamy in the autumn morning sunlight, as if it could somehow render benign even the hard-hearted harangues of Jesse or Newt that regularly bounced off the walls inside.

From the high terrace of the west facade, we looked out over the city and the Mall and the AIDS quilt stretching away toward the Washington Monument, and beyond that, Abe Lincoln. Tens of thousands of people milled quietly among the panels. Timmy had remarked the day before that he had never seen so many people in one place remain so subdued. The quiet was partly a sign of respect, we concluded, and of so many of the quilt visitors being lost in memory, but it was also that no words felt adequate to express the quilt's huge and complex meaning.

Timmy said, "It's funny. Five minutes ago I was really frightened, but here I actually feel safe. In fact, this is the first time in twelve hours that I've actually felt safe. Not that I necessarily am safe," he added, and took a quick look back toward Pennsylvania Avenue. I looked around, too, but saw no one who stood out among the quilt visitors and other tourists and passersby. Dolan had not described Ewell Flower to us, so I didn't know whom to look for.

Timmy went on, "It's interesting how most gay people aren't usually aware of feeling wnsafe. But at these big, mainly gay events, you're always aware of feeling safe in a way you never do any other time. Do you know what I mean?"

I said I knew, but Dolan just said, "I'll take your word for it."

I asked, "Is this Ewell Flower following us? Have you spotted him since we left the coffee shop?"

"No, and he probably knows I made him. He's a short, skinny African-American man, gray-haired, wearing shades, in a black windbreaker. If they've got a tail on you, he probably switched off with somebody. I don't recognize anybody else from the division just now. I guess they could be using people from outside the division. So, yeah, we could still be under surveillance."

Dolan said all this nonchalantly, but I could all but hear Timmy's sphincter squeaking as it tightened. My own bloodstream was on the move, too.

"What reasons can you think of," I asked, "why Timmy and I might be under surveillance by the Metro Police Department?"

"Craig might suspect strongly that you had something to do with the shooting. Is there any reason he should?"

"Of course not," Timmy said. "That's just wacky."

"No, not wacky, just not real smart. Ray is one of those guys out of another age who think that if you are homosexual, you are, ipso facto, mentally impaired and possibly dangerous. Ray and I have talked about his old-fashioned opinions, which for some reason he seems to want to hang on to."

"Have you been to law school?" I asked Dolan.

"I went to Howard prelaw for a year. I learned a lot of history and a lot of law, and I learned to speak standard American English. But I knew all I ever really wanted was to be a cop, so I switched to an M.A. program in criminal justice. I had an uncle who was an officer in the department until a sociopathic child shot him in the heart in 1989. James Dolan was the kind of man who made police work look like a noble calling. For him, it was a noble calling, I still believe, although for me it's been quite a bit more complicated than that."

"Because you're an African-American lesbian?" I said.

"No, because I'm a woman."

"Oh."

"And now my life is about to become even more complicated in the division on account of you two. I'm not complaining," Dolan said, and hoisted herself, one ham at a time, onto the stone balustrade beneath what must have been the House Speaker's office. "I'm glad you called me. What you told me is interesting.

Maybe I can help out a little bit-I don't know yet. But word'll get back to Ray Craig, if it hasn't already, that you guys are talking to me. So we better get our stories straight, right?"

Timmy said, "Absolutely."

"Let's say you heard about me from Bob Bittner, over at Frankie's office-which is true-and you wanted to check in with a gay cop and tell your story to somebody who'd lend a more sympathetic ear than Ray did. That's true, too, and even more important than being true, it's plausible. Ray'll probably just say,

'Oh, they have to go and be PC What we don't need to repeat to anybody at this point is all that interesting stuff you told me about this Jim Suter, and the quilt panel, and Betty Krumfutz. Let's keep all that amongst ourselves for now. If there is somebody in the department who is criminally involved, we don't want it to get back, okay?"

We both said no, we didn't want that.

"See, the thing of it is," Dolan went on coolly, "I made a couple of calls before I met you at the bagel shop, and early this morning Craig came up with two witnesses to your friend getting shot. A man and a woman were sitting in a parked car- sharing a joint, it sounds like-about forty yards down E Street. And they saw the whole thing: Sudbury come out his door and walk to his car, a white Honda with Maryland plates roll down the street, stop beside him, and then gunfire. Then the car- which probably was a white Honda stolen earlier in the evening in Kensington-proceeded at a high rate of speed down E Street and turned left at First. The witnesses got a quick look at the driver-who was probably the shooter-and at his front-seat passenger. Both of them, the witnesses said, looked Latino, they thought. Central American, Indian-looking, not Spanish. What the witnesses actually said was, the perpetrators looked Mexican."

Timmy shook his head in amazement. "This is all for real."

I asked Dolan, "If I can locate and talk to Jim Suter and get his story, can you help me find a way to protect him?"

Grimly she said, "Look, this whole episode has drug-operation turf war written all over it. If that's what Jim Suter is involved in, maybe nobody can protect him and you will want to do one thing and one thing only, and that is, stand way clear. You mean this didn't occur to you, Donald? Mexico is now a key transit point for South American narcotics entering the United States. Mexican officials, police agencies, often the narcs themselves, want a piece of this billion-dollar pie. It's a poor country where a lot of people just go ahead and grab what they can. You didn't consider that that might be the source of Jim Suter's troubles?"

"It occurred to me," I said. "But what's a former Republican congresswoman from Central Pennsylvania got to do with it? That part of it makes no sense."

"I guess that's a question you'll have to ask Jim Suter."

"Will you help me investigate?" I said. "I'd like to do what I can to bring in the people who shot Maynard, and to do it without hurting Jim Suter, if that's possible. That's the way Maynard would want me to do it, I think-not that he has any real idea of what Suter's involvement is. The one thing that's certain in all this is that Maynard had no known connection to whatever is going on here, and he does not deserve to be lying shot up in a hospital bed struggling to stay alive."

"Yeah, that's usually the way it goes," Dolan said. "No, I won't help you investigate the case. I haven't been assigned to it, and I won't be, and I've got another six or eight dozen cases open at the moment. What I will do is: I'll keep you up to speed on the department's progress on the case as well as I can without actually doing anything that might jeopardize my job. I'll also try to find out who else in the department is keeping close track of the case, and why.

That should help out."

Timmy said, "What if you find out a lot of people in the department, especially higher-ups, are keeping close tabs on the case?"

Dolan shrugged. "What if I do?"

"But wouldn't that be significant?" Timmy was pale and looked a little woozy.

"I guess it would be," Dolan said, and caught my eye. She seemed to be thinking what I was thinking, that maybe it was time for Timmy to head back to Albany.