Strachey's folly

Chapter 8

Log Heaven, Pennsylvania, was up in the thinly populated central part of the state off Interstate 80. The autumn foliage was at its brilliant peak under a high blue sky crisscrossed with big, floating jet vapor trails that looked like ancient glyphs above the earth. I wondered what they meant. Probably Scranton-Pittsburgh, Baltimore-Toronto. The broad highway swept between and sometimes up and down the state's old, worn, friendly mountains, and I wished Timmy were along to enjoy the scenic ride.

He was back in Washington, where we had met some of Maynard's friends when they converged on GW University Hospital. Some of them were going to maintain a watch at the hospital-Maynard's condition was unchanged when I left early Sunday afternoon-and others planned on cleaning up Maynard's house in hopeful anticipation of Maynard's recovery and eventual return.

Neither Timmy nor I told Maynard's friends about Jim Suter's mysterious quilt panel or the letter from Mexico full of warnings. So everyone who knew Maynard remained baffled as to why he might have been shot down in the street and his home ransacked. Some of them speculated on a book or an article he might have been working on that exposed foreign criminality of some sort, but no one could recall Maynard's mentioning any such project. On the contrary, everyone said, Maynard had been doing relatively undemanding straight travel writing since he'd picked up his stomach ailment.

A couple of times I referred to Maynard's recent trip to Mexico. I thought it might jog someone's memory of any remark Maynard might have made about Jim Suter. But Maynard either never told anyone of the odd meeting in Merida, or none of his acquaintances considered it worth mentioning now.

Chondelle Dolan was able to use her GOP Capitol Hill contacts-she'd once been involved, she had told me that morning, with the first black female member of the Log Cabin Club-to track down former congresswoman Krumfutz. On the staff now of the conservative Glenn Beale Foundation, Mrs. Krumfutz kept an apartment in Washington as well as her Log Heaven home, which she often visited on weekends. She had driven up to Pennsylvania Saturday evening with a friend, Chondelle said, several hours after Maynard had pointed her out to Timmy and me at the Jim Suter quilt panel.

I'd made a plane reservation for a flight to the Yucatan on Tuesday morning. I figured twenty-four hours in Log Heaven would give me enough time to confront Mrs. Krumfutz and extract from her what was extractable concerning her examination on Saturday of the Suter quilt panel and her subsequent panicked, hasty departure from the quilt display and then from Washington. I knew I ran some risk of tipping off the people who had shot Maynard-whoever and whatever they wereand of further endangering Suter. But I convinced myself that the risk was slight and worth taking.

Timmy's Capitol Hill friend Bob Bittner had briefed me on the Krumfutz illegal-campaign-fund scandal-at Timmy's request, Bittner did not ask why I was inquiring about this-and I learned that not only had Mrs. Krumfutz been cleared of any involvement in the scam, but that she had been eager to disassociate herself from her husband, who had spent many tens of thousands of dollars of congressional campaign donations on the home and wardrobe of one Tammy Pam Jameson, of Engineville, near Log Heaven. Mrs. Krumfutz had eagerly testified against her husband at his trial, and I concluded that if she had more recently uncovered additional criminality-by way of the AIDS quilt or otherwise-she would be more inclined to talk about it to me or to the police than to anyone involved in the crime, especially her low slug of a husband. And I did not plan on tracking down Nelson Krumfutz-now residing in Engineville with Tammy Pam, I was told-just yet.

I pulled into Log Heaven in the black shadows of the surrounding mountains under a fall sunset that was a puddle of fire. The sky looked like a Jehovah's Witness's Watchtower magazine cover, and I remembered that the millennium was just a few years away. Maybe Armageddon would start off in Log Heaven. It seemed as likely a place as any, despite warnings from the TV preachers that when Good rose up and vanquished Evil, San Francisco would get it first. Then the West Village, the East Village, and Chelsea. Would a wrathful God spare SoHo? Park Slope? TriBeCa? This was unclear.

I cruised down Log Heaven's Main Street, with its three-block-long business district that looked half-dead and half-hanging-on-by-a-fraying-economic-thread.

Most of the storefronts were vacant, and the few that weren't were occupied by social-service agencies and businesses with names like Natalie's Nail Heaven, Fenstermacher's Tanning Parlor ("Tan Yer Fanny by the Susquehanny"), and the Mattress Madness Outlet Store. Three big furniture factories I'd passed on the edge of town were dark and boarded up, and the only sizable employer I spotted was a mobile-home assembly plant. I doubled back up River Street.

The Susquehanna, one of the loveliest streams in America, was no longer visible from the town that the river had apparently once made prosperous.

Somebody-the Army Corps of Engineers, I suspected-had put up a thirty-foot-high, earth-and-stone dike-levee system, a flood-control solution common across floodplain America now, and in its unimaginativeness and inelegance, worthy of the mind of Benito Mussolini. It looked as if in Log Heaven, the walled-off Susquehanna survived largely for the esthetic pleasure of an occasional small-plane pilot and in the minds of the old people.

Back on the outskirts of town, I pulled my rental car into the Bit o' Heaven Motel and checked in. The clerk, a stout, middleaged woman with a fresh perm and pale teddy bears on her pink blouse, smelled of Ivory soap and Kraft macaroni-and-cheese dinner. When I asked about getting a bite to eat, she suggested that I try Pizza Hut or Karen's Kozy Korner, both up the road. She said they were both good.

I checked the Log Heaven-Engineville phone book and found that Betty Krumfutz was not listed. I told the clerk I was a reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer — it seemed like an efficient enough little fib-and I asked for directions to the Krumfutz residence.

"I feel sorry for that woman," the clerk said. "Betty got a raw deal."

"Yes, her husband was the wrongdoer," I agreed.

"She's a celebrity, but it's taken a toll. Is the Inquire going after her now?" She pronounced Inquirer "IN-quire," which I'd never heard before, and she seemed ready to be annoyed.

"No, it'll be a favorable piece. Betty's had a tough row to hoe. And far be it from the Inquirer to add to her woes."

The clerk told me that her husband's mother "still reads the Inquire" — an eccentricity of the elderly, it was made to sound like-and she'd ask her to save my article. Then she told me how to find the Krumfutz house on Susquehanna Drive in Log Heaven. She said she thought Betty would be home; the clerk had a friend who was in Betty's target-practice group, which met on Sunday afternoons. So Betty always made it a point to be in Log Heaven on Sundays, "for church and target practice."

"What do they shoot?" I asked.

The clerk looked puzzled. "Bottles and cans and things like that, I guess."

"With guns?"

"Why, yes. It's the gun-club members."

"Who all is in the gun club? Hunters? Sportsmen?"

She nodded, beginning to look a little suspicious of this in-lerrogation.

I took a wild stab and said, "An American citizen's constitutional right to bear arms is the envy of the world. I was speaking to a Canadian recently who was thinking of emigrating to the United States so that he could keep his own firearm for self-protection. He drives down to Watertown, New York, once a week for target practice there. Are there any foreigners like that in the Log Heaven gun club? Or, I guess Log Heaven is too far from the border for that."

"Funny you should ask that," the motel clerk said. "Both Luis and Hector are in the gun club, I know. They work in the kitchen at the Kozy Korner. Karen's in the gun club and she got her two Mexicans to join, she told me. But she said they already knew how to shoot, and they actually taught her a thing or two. But I doubt if they came to America for target practice. They came to get work.

Which I say, more power to them. You try to get our kids to wash dishes these days, and you might as well ask them to fly to the moon. It's even hard to get kids these days who'll rake and bag leaves. They might get their hands dirty. But Luis and Hector, why they'll even do yard work. As a matter of fact, they've been doing work lately around the Krumfutz place. Karen said Betty had hired Hector and Luis for some type of work she had, and Betty told Karen that she was quite satisfied with the good job they did."