Third man out

12

There's no name on this entry," Timmy said. "It just says 'A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite.' "

"Who's that?" I asked Sandifer. "What does he mean by 'A for-whatever-it-is Mega-Hypocrite?"

" 'A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite,'" Timmy said again.

Sandifer looked baffled. "I don't know. I have no idea."

"All the other names in the index are spelled out," Timmy said. "Mega-Hypocrite is the only one that's coded like that."

We were back in Albany and had the file cabinet in the spare room in the second-floor rear of our house on Crow Street. The top drawer was open and I was checking the actual files against the index Timmy was reading from. The first name on the "A" page had been "Anderson, Cliff," and the file had been in the front of the drawer where it should have been. But when I looked for the second folder, for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite, it was not in the drawer.

"All-American Mega-Hypocrite is missing. Or maybe it's misfiled."

"I would doubt it," Sandifer said. "There were some things John could be careless about, but not recordkeeping. He was meticulous."

I searched through the files, in case Mega-Hypocrite had slid down or been uncharacteristically misplaced somehow.

"How would anybody stealing the file know that All-American Mega-Hypocrite was his designation?" Timmy said. "Eddie doesn't even know what it meant."

"Dunno. He might have forced Rutka to tell him which one was his file. We can assume he didn't know about the index in the desk drawer or he would have taken it. Or, he might have checked the files for a folder under his own name and, when he didn't find one, started a random search. He'd have come to the All-American Mega-Hypocrite file right away, maybe seen that the shoe fit, and verified it by going through the actual contents of the file."

I kept flipping through the folders, eyes peeled for Mega-Hypocrite. I asked Sandifer if there were any of the outees or soon-to-be-outees Rutka considered to be especially repugnantly hypocritical. "Bruno Slinger maybe?"

"He considered them all sickeningly hypocritical," Sandifer said. "The worst one was always the one he was going after during whatever week it was."

Rutka's column in the next planned Queerscreed, galleys of which we had carried off from his desktop, outed an independently wealthy ACLU booster, not much of a candidate for Mega-Hypocrite.

Timmy said, "If they weren't for the cause, they were against it, eh?" He was gripping the index sheaf tightly, and I was glad it wasn't a club.

"Sort of," Sandifer said. "I guess you could put it that way."

"Righteous John Rutka and the unrighteous multitudes."

"Timothy," I said, reminding him with a look that it was all moot now.

"Actually," Sandifer said, "there was this one person, I know, who John had been working on for a long time trying to get the goods on. He knew the guy was gay but he didn't have the proof, or enough proof. He never told me who it was because he said I'd never believe it."

"Why wouldn't you have believed it? Didn't you trust John?"

Sandifer flushed and gave a quick embarrassed shrug. "John was sometimes loose with some of his facts."

"Even with you?"

"He just couldn't help it. I realized this about him not long after we met. But it was just the way he was and I got used to it. He mostly just made things up about himself, not other people. I don't think he was ever dishonest in his work. He would never say it, but I think he knew he'd been able to maintain his professional integrity and he was proud of that. And he was always careful in his outing columns to get his facts right."

"What else did he tell you about this special case? Could this be our Mr. A-for-All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite?"

"I can't remember. I don't think he said anything else about the guy. The only reason I remember at all," Sandifer said, "is because John got a kind of funny, intense look when he mentioned it. I can remember the day. We were in the car driving up the street in Handbag and he told me about this guy he said he was really going to fix, and he had this look on his face I'd never seen before. I can still see him."

"Describe the look."

"Just weird, intense. And I think he might have been blushing a little. Or maybe just angry. I don't know what it was."

"Mega-Hypocrite is nowhere in the top drawer," I said. I started through the bottom drawer.

Timmy had been flipping idly through the index sheets, perusing the names, and clucking in mild disgust.

"What!"

He'd been perched on the edge of the guest room bed and suddenly he rose straight up like a Looney Tunes character. He went into a swivet, hit the ceiling, went through the roof. "Did you see this?"

"What's that?"

"I'm in here! My name is in the index!"

"Now do you agree it's better that I deal with the files and they don't fall into the hands of the police?"

"Let me see the file. Look in the C’s."

"I didn't know," Sandifer said. "Jeez, I'm really sorry."

I handed Timmy the folder with his name on it and said, "This is a pretty slender dossier for a pervert as outrageous as yourself."

He read it. "This is disgusting. It's from a hotel employee who says- Oh, crime-en-ee."

I kept on flipping through the bottom drawer searching for Mega-Hypocrite.

"Have you seen this?" he said, moaning.

"I have."

"That liar."

"It's always risky placing your trust in economists."

"He told me he'd never done it before with a North American."

"And did the earth move?"

"I guess you two have a pretty open relationship," Sandifer said. "John and I did for a while, but everything started to come apart, so we went back to monogamy."

"Our rules are variable," I said. "Well, no, that's not quite it."

Timmy snapped, "He means it's not the rules that are variable, it's the observance of them. Recently, only by me. I made a mistake once in fourteen years. And look at this putrid bilge! I would not feel any more violated and demeaned if I discovered this garbage in the files of the F.B.I. In fact, this is worse. I can't believe that gay people are doing this to other gay people. This is not a blow against the old-fashioned fear and self-loathing that made gay people miserable through the supposedly recently ended dark ages-it's just a kind of bizarre extension of it."

Sandifer was sitting in a chair with his head in his hands and saying nothing. Timmy looked over at him and said, "I guess I've made my point. I'll shut up. You don't need to be listening to this now."

"It's okay," Sandifer said dolefully. "It doesn't matter what anybody says anymore."

I said, "There's no Mega-Hypocrite file in here. Assuming that such a file actually existed, somebody seems to have taken pains to excise it."

Timmy shoved the "T. Callahan" file back my way as if it were soiling his hands and said, "Why wouldn't it have existed?"

"Rutka could have planned a file by that name, then changed his mind and used the hypocrite's real name instead. A name on one of the other files might be the real Mega-Hypocrite."

"So maybe one of the other files is missing. We haven't checked that."

"Let's do it."

It took two and a half minutes for Timmy to read off each of the 311 names in the index. A file was located for each name. The files were flawlessly arranged in alphabetical order. Still, the only file missing was the one called "A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite."

Sandifer suddenly looked alert. He said, "Maybe the books would help."

We looked at him. "Books?"

"John kept financial records for the whole outing campaign in Cityscape and Queerscreed. Sometimes he paid people for information. That's not the ideal way to go about it, I know, but John always believed that ethically these things evened themselves out over the long run."

"Where are these financial records?"

"In my bag. I brought them. I didn't think I should leave them alone in the house."

"Where's the bag?"

"In the hall." He went out and came back immediately carrying a big beat-up red shoulder bag stuffed with belongings. He unzipped it, reached in and groped around, and came up with a bookkeeper's bound entry book.

"How is this going to help?" Timmy said.

"Maybe it won't. But if Rutka had informants who dished up dirt that was so critical to the cause that Rutka was willing to lay out cash for it, maybe one of those people can figure out-or will know-who the Mega-Hypocrite is."

I scanned the ledger. Rutka seemed to have had just one source of income, the family hardware store. "HDW" brought in from three thousand to four thousand dollars each month. I asked Sandifer if Rutka had owned half the store.

"Forty-nine percent. Ann owns fifty-one. That's the way it was left to them by their father."

"John didn't resent the difference?"

"He was interested in the income, not the control. Ann runs the store for a good salary and does a good job. And the two of them got along in their way. They were different but they never got in each other's way. John lived his life and Ann lived hers."

The disbursements included household expenses- utilities, taxes, locksmith-along with occasional "personal" disbursements, and larger ones for "office and printing." Most of the payments in the latter category were made to Kopy-King. There was no category called "informants" or "spies" or "dish."

There were, however, payments to three entries listed apparently by their initials: NZ, DR, and JG. I'd never seen NZ or DR before, but JG I had. I got out Ronnie Linkletter's file and there it was: the handwritten sheet Rutka had left that said "From JG Linkletter at motel with A." Then two long rows of dates. I checked the calendar and saw that they were all Wednesdays, starting the previous July and running into mid-June.

I asked Sandifer if he knew what these initials meant. He puzzled over them and finally said no. The "A" might have meant Asshole Mega-Hypocrite, but the other initials, if that's what they were, remained indecipherable.

I read aloud the payments to NZ: $320 in December; $435 in January; $310 in February; similar amounts through July. JG received even higher amounts from October through July, totaling nearly $6,000. DR was the big money-maker. He-or she, or it

— was paid an even $ 1,400 per month from the previous September right up through July. According to a notation in the margin, all these payments had been made "in cash."

I asked Sandifer, "Were you ever with John when he met his regular informants? It looks as if that's what these entries refer to.

He could have received information from them over the phone, but he must have met them once a month to hand over the cash payments for their diligent research. People in their right minds don't send cash amounts larger than a dime through the mail these days."

"No, I never did. John would just say he had to go talk to somebody. Or he had a meeting with somebody. He wanted to keep me out of that part of it. To protect me, was what he said."

"Protect you from what? You were out in the streets hustling Queerscreed. Wasn't that where the greatest physical risk was?"

"I guess so. I'm not sure what he meant by that- protecting me. I guess he thought some of the people he was after and some of the people they were mixed up with were dangerous. And he was right," Sandifer added with eyes glistening. "John knew somehow that some of them were very dangerous people."

I could no longer argue with that. end user