Third man out

11

We drove over to Crow Street. Timmy had re-hooked up the answering machine when he arrived home from work, and now there were two messages on it. Both were from Eddie Sandifer. The first, in a tremulous voice, said, "I think somebody took John. It looks like he was kidnaped. Please, I need your help. Call me at the house as soon as you can. I'm going to call the Handbag police." The second message, delivered in a monotone, said simply, "He's dead. John's dead and I don't know what to do."

I dialed Rutka's number in Handbag.

"Yell-o."

"Eddie?"

"This is Officer Hughs of the Handbag Police Department. Who do you want?"

"Edward Sandifer."

"Hold on."

Half a minute later, an all-but-lifeless voice: "Yes?"

"This is Strachey. What happened?"

"John's dead. Somebody killed him."

"That's- I can hardly believe it."

"I know."

"He was in a fire?"

"They took him from here and tied him up in an old house and burned it down."

"Oh, hell."

"Can you come out?"

"I'm surprised you want me to."

"I do. Please come out."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes. Do they have any idea who did it?"

"No. They keep questioning me. I don't know how much to say."

"How much to say about what?"

"Well, there are some things you should know."

"Uh-huh. Have the cops asked for the files?"

"They don't seem to know about them. They keep asking for the names of people who threatened John."

"Don't mention the files. I'll be out."

"Thank you. Please hurry."

We were on 787 North in three minutes with the windows down and the hot night air loud in our faces. My headache was back and I was unable to answer Timmy's questions.

"Was Sandifer there when Rutka was dragged away?"

"I don't know."

"Where was the fire?"

"In an old house. That's all I know."

"Was he badly burned? How do they know it was Rutka's body?"

"I don't know. I know what you're thinking."

"I guess they'll be thorough-the medical examiner. Whoever confirms the identification of the body."

"They tend to be. And in this case they'll be extra thorough."

A police cruiser turned out of Elmwood Place as we turned in, and as we pulled up in front of the house a second car made a U at the end of the block and came back down and out of the neighborhood.

"Are they gone?" Sandifer said as we came in the front door.

"They're gone. Who was here?"

"John's sister Ann and Bub Bailey and another policeman." He fell back against the wall, buried his face in his hands, and heaved, up and down.

After a time, I said, "You'd better sit down, Eddie," and led him by the arm into the living room, where he collapsed in a chair, snuffling. The charred odor from the morning fire on the back porch filled the house, and it was as if it was the stench of Rutka's remains.

"I'm sorry, Eddie. What can I tell you."

"Nothing. What can anybody say? Maybe I shouldn't have gone to work tonight and left him alone. But he said I should go ahead. And there wasn't anything he had to worry about. Not really."

"There wasn't?"

He looked up at me and let loose with something that was half sigh, half shudder. "Well, you abandoned him, and you didn't even know."

"Know what?"

"I mean, you didn't know for sure."

"What? That you threw the firebomb today and shot John in the foot last night?"

He glanced at Timmy. "He's okay," I said.

Sandifer looked away. "It was John's idea," he said in a tremulous voice, "not mine. I always told him gay people didn't have to pretend to be under attack from homophobes. All we had to do was go out in public and not hide the fact we were gay and sooner or later we'd get our faces punched in, if that's what he wanted to prove. But he said there was never enough evidence, or gay people were afraid to report it, or the cops would ignore it-if they weren't the ones doing the beating themselves. So sometimes you had to do 'a little reality-based charade,' was how John put it.

Shooting him in the foot last night practically made me want to throw up."

"Staging a fag-bashing does seem a little redundant these days," I said. "And what was my role supposed to be in all this? Why was I lied to and manipulated and conned into the scam? To lend credibility?"

He flushed and couldn't look up at me. "That and to get feedback from the cops. John thought they'd tell you things they wouldn't tell him. And he thought all the people who had threatened him would really be freaked if they thought you might be coming after them."

I felt a rush of fury at Rutka for being dead and not available for me to get my hands around his throat. I said, "You two lunkheads sure botched the whole thing real good, didn't you? You got away with the shooting last night, so far, but your neighbor spotted you on your way to toss the bomb today. Have you confessed to the police?"

His head jerked up. "No! Jesus! I don't want to go to prison. Anyway, now there really is a killer."

"And once he's identified, he might as well take the rap for the two unsuccessful attempts, is that it?"

"Well-why not? Oh, I don't know. What difference does it make? What difference does anything make anymore!"

I said, "Have they identified the body? Are they sure it was John? What happened?"

He started to speak, then wept again. After a moment, he said, "They're pretty sure it's John they found. They'll know for sure tomorrow. Oh, God, it's real, this time! This time it's really real!"

"So you weren't here when it happened?"

He snuffled some more and then said, "I went in to work to finish up some things I didn't get to this morning when I was-you know-out for a while. It was around six-thirty when I went in. John had gotten a call earlier, the one he told you about, saying this time he was going to burn. And at first it freaked us both out, but then he said, shit, he'd gotten lots of threats and none of them ever amounted to anything, so let's forget it. So we did.

"When I got back from the shop a little after eight, I came in and John wasn't here and a chair in the dining room was knocked over and the table was pushed back with the rug all bunched up. It looked like there had been a struggle or fight and John had been kidnaped. I was really scared all of a sudden, and I called you and you weren't home, and then I called the police. They sent a cruiser out, but as soon as the cop got here he got a call on his radio about the fire and he just took off."

"You'd gone into Albany in your car?"

"In John's. It's the one we use. I don't have a car. It's the Subaru back in the garage."

"Where was the fire?"

"Down behind Pocketbook Factory Number Three," he said, and took out a bandanna and wiped his mouth and nose. "There are some abandoned houses down there that belonged to the pocketbook company. Whoever started the fire used a lot of gasoline or something and the place went up like a fireball, Bub Bailey said."

"And John's body was badly burned?"

Sandifer shook and started to lose it again. "They could tell it was John because his wallet was left on the curb out front with a note in it. And from his wounded foot and- they're going to check on other things, dental records and things like that. Ann told them which dentist." He blew his nose in the bandanna.

"What did this note say that was stuck in the wallet?"

"They showed it to me but they kept it and they kept the wallet. It was horrible. The note said-it was printed in big letters on a piece of typing paper-it said, 'This is what happens to assholes who invade people's privacy.' "

"That's plain enough. It tends to confirm the motive."

"Why else would anybody do it?" Sandifer said. "Who else would want to kill John?"

"Can you think of anyone?"

"No, it must have been one of the people he outed. Or more than one of them. They'd've had to drag John out of here. He had a gun and he wouldn't have gone without a struggle. Maybe there were two, or even three or four."

"Where is the gun now?"

"I haven't seen it. I'll have to look."

"Did the police question the neighbors?"

"Chief Bailey went around himself. He said nobody saw or heard any fight or anything violent."

I said, "What are these, pod people around here? Nobody comes or goes, or sees or hears anything."

"They're elderly," Sandifer said. "They stay in with their air conditioners and their televisions on."

"What did you tell Bailey about the threats John received? You can be sure he'll question everybody who ever threatened John to find out where they were tonight-and last night when John was shot in the foot, and this morning at the time of the fire. You might even get Bailey believing that the other so-called attempts were real. I guess I'm glad you told me the truth, but I'm not crazy about knowing your dirty little politically-far-too-correct secret and having to pretend to Bub Bailey that I don't."

Timmy, who had sat silently scowling through my en tire exchange with Sandifer, suddenly piped up. "I'm not crazy about being in on it either."

This was why I hardly ever brought him along on business. Tonight had been a lapse. I said, "But now you are in on it, so let's just get on with the more important questions."

He looked away in disgust.

I said to Sandifer, "What names did you give Bailey?"

"Just the ones on the list John made up of people who threatened him-Slinger and Linkletter and those. And I gave him a complete set of Cityscapes and Queerscreeds with John's outing columns. I didn't mention any of the anonymous calls though, or all the people in the files. Do you think I should have brought them up?"

"No. I'll deal with those."

This got Timmy's attention again. "What do you mean?"

"I'll use the files. There's no reason for the police to have to go into them if I'm covering that end of the investigation." He gave me a look. "The files are obviously the key to finding John's killer or killers. And since it's important that they not fall into the hands of a government agency that might misuse them-as police agencies almost inevitably will-then I'll just have to take possession of the files and use them to find the killer and turn him-or them-over to the police with enough evidence to convict."

"Will you do that?" Sandifer said, looking a little brighter. "God, that would be great."

"Don-" Timmy said, and then realizing he could not say what he wanted to say in front of Sandifer, he waved it away.

"I don't have any choice," I said, "as far as I can see. It's either turn the files over to the cops, which is out of the question, or use them as an investigative tool at least as effectively as the police would. What else can I do?"

"Maybe you should just turn them over," Timmy said uneasily. "It's the Handbag police who'd be looking at them, not the much more dangerous Albany cops. Anyway, anybody who's in those files must have done so many disgusting things that the police already have them on their lists of the region's most outrageous perverts."

"I can't believe you said that."

"Well, you know what I mean."

Sandifer said, "They do tend to be the biggest whores. Most of those people didn't get into the files without being real scuzzballs."

"Scuzzballs deserve their privacy too," I said, "the Burger Court's loony Five Stooges 1986 opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Anyway, I happen to have read through those files this morning, and I can tell you that most of the people in there are simply gay men and women who live Ozzie-and-Harriet lives with their significant others, more or less, and a few of whom have strayed once in a while and their indiscretions happen to have been picked up and noted by some of John Rutka's informants. Should that information become official police information?"

"No," Timmy said, "of course not." He had on a distant thoughtful look, as if this were an interesting theoretical question concerning the abstract gay masses.

"John would be grateful," Sandifer said, and began to grow teary again. "He's always sort of expected to be disappointed in the people he's counted on. It was years before he even trusted me totally. It would have mattered a lot that you stuck by him, Strachey."

Timmy sat there with a quizzical look, as if unsure how I had managed to end up taking on work that would help serve as a memorial to a man Timmy had considered rotten to the core and whom I hadn't been too crazy about either. Whatever my degree of responsibility or lack of it in John Rutka's death-I didn't have the will or the energy to think about that quite yet-I was still obliged to stay on the case for one very good reason: as soon as I found the killer I could burn the loathsome files.

I said, "We'd better haul the files out of here and over to Crow Street, where I can lock them up." Timmy winced. "Eddie, maybe you'd better come too. You're probably in no danger, but you'll be able to feel secure in our spare room, and anyway I might need you to answer some questions about the files."

"Yeah, okay. I don't want to stay here alone tonight. I don't want to sleep alone in that room."

In the teenaged girl's bedroom on the second floor, Sandifer reached into the hippo's belly for the attic keys. He groped around, then shook the animal, vigorously, and then frantically.

"The keys aren't here."

We tore out to the attic door, which hung open. The keys dangled in the upper of the two locks. The light was on in the airless attic but the fan was off, as if someone had been there briefly and then left in a hurry. The desk and file cabinet appeared undisturbed, except that the top file drawer had been pulled out. It did not have a ransacked look, however. I said, "I suppose there's no way to tell if a file has been removed, or is there?"

"The index," Sandifer said, and opened the top drawer of the desk. He removed a bundle of papers clipped together and said,

"We'll have to go through both drawers and check the files against the list. Do you think whoever took John made him open the files first and took his own out?"

"His or theirs. That's what it looks like."

"Jesus. Then all we have to do to find out who did it is to see whose file is missing."

"Maybe. Though a killer who's playing with a full deck would have thought of the possibility of an index to the files and would have taken them all. Or he'd have taken someone else's file to aim the investigation in the wrong direction."

"Maybe he's not that smart," Sandifer said, and I hoped he was right. Although it was soon apparent that whether the pilferer of the files was brilliant or stupid hardly mattered at all. end user