Third man out

14

The 8:25 A.M. "Hometown Folks" news insert on Channel Eight led with the story on John Rutka's death. A reporter stood in front of the smoke rising from the charred ruins of a house near the pocketbook factory and announced that police had tentatively identified a body found in the rubble as that of "controversial gay activist John Rutka." A fireman showed up to make the obliga-tory statement that the house had been "fully involved" when the firefighters arrived and to label the blaze "suspicious." Timmy had already left for work and wasn't there to ask, "What was the fire suspicious of?"

Bub Bailey appeared briefly to say that Rutka had been reported kidnaped earlier in the evening and that additional evidence pointed to foul play. A full investigation was being launched, he said.

Other stories on the "Hometown Folks" news-quickie concerned a full-landfill crisis in a Greene County town where residents had begun to heap their garbage in the town supervisor's elderly mother's front yard; a statement from recent U.S. Second Circuit Appeals Court nominee and former Albany State football star Emmett "Pincher" Goerlach insisting that his remark in a 1989 speech to the Albany Rotary Club urging mandatory HIV testing for all unmarried Americans was "taken out of context" by its ACLU critics; and an elementary school in Watervliet that was raising money to send a bird with a broken wing to the Mayo Clinic.

Ronnie Linkletter, shoved from the heights of six and eleven after being outed in Queerscreed, came on for a quick do-si-do in front of a weather map that had a big winking smile face over the Northeast. This meant it would be sunny. I studied Linkletter's boyish face for signs of stress or anxiety but could discern none. His seemed to be as carefree and unrevealing as the smile face on the map.

Sandifer watched the news with me. When the report on the fire and Rutka's death came on, he slid into despondency and then shifted around and grew suddenly angry when Ronnie Linkletter appeared.

"He could be the one," Sandifer said. "He was one of the people who told John he was going to get him for what he did, and he could be the one who did it."

"He could."

I dialed around to the other area stations but had missed their local reports. The Schenectady PBS outlet was on the air even at this early hour with its pledge-week team and a fund-raising festival of June Allyson- Jimmy Stewart movies and reruns of The Bell Telephone Hour. The station was advertising a repeat showing of a Kingston Trio concert for its hipper viewers.

I brought the Times Union in from the front stoop. Because of the paper's earlier deadline, its report on Rutka and the fire was even sketchier than Channel Eight's had been. In the T-U, Rutka was a CHA, a "controversial homosexual activist."

I drove Sandifer out to Handbag so that he could check in with Bub Bailey and tell him some lies. We coordinated our stories on the way out. I would not have thought of myself as so skillful a dissembler as John Rutka, but it was I who took the lead in contriving a scenario for the loss of the files. The well-practiced Sandifer slid right into the routine.

Five messages were on Rutka's answering machine when Sandifer checked it. Bub Bailey asked Sandifer to phone him as soon as Sandifer got in. A Times Union reporter asked for a callback. Ann Rutka informed Sandifer that the funeral would be in two days, on Saturday, at nine-thirty, at St. Michael's in Handbag. There would be no calling hours at the funeral home. And two Queer Nation friends of Sandifer's and Rutka's phoned, both angry and distraught. One suggested an action to protest "gay genocide."

Sandifer reached Bub Bailey, who said he'd like to speak with Eddie and would drive over to the house. I listened while Sandifer ranted on cue to the T-U reporter. He managed to bring Ronald Reagan into his remarks about Rutka's murder in Handbag, as well as George Bush, and of course the fiend Ed Koch. It was as if Sandifer was trying to say what Rutka himself would have had to say about his own murder but he couldn't get it quite right. Or maybe he duplicated exactly what Rutka's spiel would have been. There wasn't any way to know.

At eleven-thirty I was back in Albany. I left the car in Washington Park and hiked over to State Street and the row of elegant turn-of-the-century manses that lined the northern edge of the park. Like most of the houses in the row, the big redstone Victorian castle I approached had been cut up into apartments for the bureaucrats and professionals who had long since replaced the rich merchants and Democratic machine hacks as Albany's life-blood. The rents were high, the address correct, and the view splendid, of the leas and copses in Frederick Law Olmsted's upstate vast green gem.

The park was lovely and enduring, having survived even Nelson Rockefeller's attempt in the 1960s to run an interstate highway through it, and so detracting in a small way from the late governor's success as the Godzilla of urban design.

I pressed the button over a name in a recessed entry-way that once must have been the servants' entrance.

"Yo?"

"It's Strachey."

A buzzer sounded and I pulled open a heavy oak door with an etched-glass window. I slid the gate open on the ancient two-passenger Otis, shoved it shut behind me, and pushed the button for four. The door to the sole top-floor apartment had been left open a crack and I went in and shut the door behind me.

"Hey, Strachey."

"Scotty."

He motioned and I followed him through the apartment with its marble and mirrors and silk flowers and gray leather couches.

Scott S. Scott was barefoot and otherwise clad only in blue nylon running shorts and red suspenders-his brunch costume, I guessed. His classically proportioned physique was flawless except for a barely perceptible incipient bulge at the sides, and his tan had been evenly applied, the kind you might expect to see on a movie star of the 1950s or a Kennedy.

I said, "I thought only Larry King wore suspenders like that anymore."

"Well, I get a lot of customers who are nostalgic for the eighties."

He led me out onto a rooftop garden that was shielded from sight by high hedges, and we sat under a honeysuckle-covered trellis alive with bees slurping nectar.

"Can I get you a Bloody Mary? Some blow?"

"Is that iced tea in that pitcher?"

"No, I think that's beer from last night."

"Thanks, I'll pass."

"The kid who cleans up hasn't come in yet."

I said, "Any problems with the help these days?"

I had met Scott S. Scott four years earlier, when he hired me to look into allegations by several of his customers that one of the male prostitutes he employed was attempting to blackmail well-off, deeply closeted customers. I identified the self-starter and arranged for his transportation to Southern California, where he later became vice president of a television home-shopping network.

Scott said, "No, the boys are cool. They know I won't put up with shit. And I'm more careful now who I hire. I run background checks. I want guys from stable homes who preferably attend church. Would you be interested in doing some background work? I use the Fricker Agency, but sometimes they get sloppy."

"Backgrounders are a little unexciting for me at this stage of the game, Scott. I guess not."

"Of course, so much of my business now is electronic. And for that you don't need good character. The business is changing."

"You mean phone sex?"

"I have a suite of offices over in Corporate Woods. You should drop in sometime, Strachey, and see my operation. I advertise in Outweek, the Native, the Advocate, and the rest. The color glossies of the hunks come from an agency in L.A. and cost me an arm and a leg. But I've got this roomful of trolls over by the interstate I pay six bucks an hour to, while the callers cough up a buck a minute. You don't need choirboys for an operation like this. Just some horny old farts who'll show up on time and talk dirty for eight hours. With the labor surplus around here, it's like printing money."

"I don't suppose you have to worry about the Japanese competition."

"Hey, don't bet the farm on it. I was up to tar and feather my broker the other night and he was telling me how the Japs are getting into female retail sex in Mexico now. They've got whorehouses in Baja and Guadalajara where you can go down in the early evening and see the women doing calisthenics and marching up and down and singing the company song."

"I guess you were speaking metaphorically when you said you went up to tar and feather your broker. Or were you?"

"I do it at his place in Saratoga. He has a pool, and a grill where we can heat the tar. Not to boiling, the way they used to in the olden days. Just so it's soft enough to apply. Weird, huh? It's how he gets off. I go up once a week when his wife's down shopping in the city, and I bring a crew and tape it. Hey, it's getting hot out here. Are you sure I can't offer you a drink or a line or something?"

I said, "No, it's a little early in the day for my glass of port. But you can be your wonderfully hospitable self by telling me something."

"Maybe."

"Without mentioning names-I know you don't do that-were any of your regulars people who were outed by John Rutka?"

He stood up now, casually adjusted the organs inside his shorts, and sat down again. "I can answer that, yes," he said. "Two were outed and about ninety-two were scared shitless they were going to be next. For a guy who thought it was so great to be gay, Rutka was some pain in the ass to gay people, that's for sure."

"Did any of your customers seem especially unhinged by being outed, or by the prospect of being outed?"

"I know what you're thinking. When I heard Rutka had been murdered, I wondered the same thing. Who hated him so much or was so afraid of him he'd kill him to shut him up? I don't know. Like I say, every gay person in the closet in Albany hated Rutka's guts. But I never heard anybody say they were actually going to do anything. I'd remember."

"What about this? Have you or any of your staff run into customers who were violent, or seemed capable of great violence?"

"Two," he said without hesitation.

"Can you give me the names?"

"Sure. Fortunately, they're both in prison. Lars Forrester, the Troy bank exec they nailed for embezzlement. And Nelson Lunceford, the state insurance regulator who strangled his valet in the locker room of the Fort Orange Club last year. I had bad reports on both of them."

"They're both still locked up?"

"And will be for a long time. I've kept track of those two."

"What about S amp;M? Any practitioners? I don't mean the exotic stuff-tarring and feathering and whatnot-but just your plain, old-fashioned, down-home, wholesome types of S amp;M-hoods and thongs and chains and so forth. Chains especially I'd like to hear about."

He leaned back now, thoughtfully, with his hands behind his head, displaying his exquisite biceps and perfectly tanned armpits. "I can't answer that," Scott said. "For one thing, it's confidential. And anyway, there are too many of them for the information to be of any use to you. There are ten or twelve regulars I can think of right off the top of my head who like the feel of metal."

"Other kinds of metal, too? What do you mean? Pie plates?"

"No, just chains."

"Ah."

"Channel Eight said Rutka was tied up in the house that burned down. Was he bound with chains? Is that why you're asking?"

"Yeah."

"I'll have to think about that-think about different people. You know, Strachey, anybody can go into a hardware store and buy as many feet of chain as they want and have it cut into lengths or anything. I've done it myself. Chains are not just something people use for sex."

"I suppose that's true. What about this?" I said. "I've got three sets of initials. I think they belong to people who know their way around gay Albany. Especially closeted gay Albany. I want to know if these initials mean anything to you."

"I don't know about this. But go ahead."

"J.G."

Now he gave me his profile. The Thinker. "Maybe. I can't think. Maybe."

"D.R."

"Mmmm. I don't know. Hmm."

"N.Z."

"Oh-N.Z. Right. Nathan Zenck."

"Nathan Z-E-N-C-K?" He nodded. "Who is Nathan Zenck?"

"He's the assistant manager of the Parmalee Plaza on Wolf Road. He's the night manager, I think."

"Of the hotel or the restaurant?"

"The whole thing. What are these initials? Should I be telling you this?"

"Yes, you should, but I can't tell you why. It's confidential."

"I can relate to that."

"Tell me about Nathan."

He sighed, shifted, readjusted his genitals. "He's gay, kind of cute, forty or forty-one, unattached. Travels with the guest accommodations crowd. Likes to party. Nathan's a mover, too. He's been in Albany for two or three years, but I don't imagine he'll want to hang around here. He'll cut out soon. He wants the big time-San Juan or Orlando."

"What else about him?"

"I don't know. What else is there? His sign, his favorite color? What do you mean?"

"I don't know what I mean. Anyway, this is a start. It's been helpful. I appreciate it, Scott."

He leaned forward now across the coffee table that separated us and looked at me and let me catch his scent. He said, "You want me, don't you?"

"Sort of."

"It'll cost you."

I began to laugh, and then Scott S. Scott joined in, so that he wouldn't be left out, and he laughed too.

I stopped by my office, on Central, which I generally avoided in summer since the air conditioner quit early in Reagan's first term, but I wanted to pick up my mail and use the phone. I called Bub Bailey, who told me that the medical examiner had confirmed beyond doubt that the body found in the burned house in Handbag the previous night had been that of John Rutka.

I said, "They're sure?"

"The gunshot wound in the foot, and of course the dental exam. It's the dental that does it. It's as good as fingerprints."

"So that's that."

I half-listened while Bailey went on about the missing files and how critical they were to his investigation. I kept thinking about John Rutka being forced from his house, and chained, and shot, and burned to not much more than ash. Until this moment I hadn't entirely believed it. My reserve of disbelief had salved my conscience over abandoning Rutka when he had pleaded with me not to-even with his scams, maybe he had known he was in real danger-and I had clung at some level to the notion that Rutka was still alive so that I could shake him until his head swam and tell him one more time exactly how little I thought of him.

Now I had no hope of any of that and my headache was back, and I deserved it and worse.

I passed on to Bailey what Joel McClurg had told me about the candidate for outing whom Rutka had confessed to being deeply afraid of, but I said I didn't know anything about the files. He muttered something and we both hung up. I found some aspirin in the back of my top desk drawer. The stamp on the back of the container said, "Use before Dec. 1979," so I took three. end user