Third man out

18

Where's the file?" Slinger said, gaping at my empty-handedness. "You didn't bring it with you?"

" It'?"

"You said you had the file Rutka kept on me. Do you mean to say you didn't bring it?"

I was seated on a settee across from Slinger in the living room of his Chestnut Street townhouse with the air conditioner on high and a gas fire blazing symmetrically in the fireplace. The portrait hanging above the mantel was of the Republican leader of the state senate, and on a sideboard there were signed photos in silver frames of, among others, Roy Cohn, Barbara Walters, and Adnan Khashoggi.

Slinger leaned toward me, looking edgy and vaguely predatory, and it was hard to resist the urge to back away. He was a big man and it was plain that under his dressing gown he had the massive chest and shoulders of someone who worked out an hour or two a day. He had a granite face with angry gray eyes, and wore a pompadoured hairpiece worthy of a CNN anchor.

Slinger suddenly pulled something from the pocket of his gown and flipped it onto the mahogany coffee table between us.

"What have we here, Bruno?"

"Count it."

"That won't be necessary."

"It's five thousand dollars. Take it. I'll trust you to walk home and bring back the file."

"The file is staying where it is, but that's beside the point."

He looked at me and made no move to take back the wad of cash wrapped with a rubber band. "I suppose you want me to suck your dick," he said. "Is that what this is all about? You want me to come over there and get down on my knees and suck your cock and lick your balls."

"Why did you work so hard to kill the hate-crimes bill?" I said.

He fell back now and snorted once. "I don't believe this. You call me up and threaten me with Rutka's goddamn files and then when I try to play your game the way you want it played, you back off. What's with you anyway, Strachey? What do you want?"

I said, "It's true, I did introduce the subject of the files in hopes of getting your cooperation, Bruno. But I don't want your money, and God knows I don't want you slobbering on any part of me. I just want you to answer two questions and then we can talk about the files. The first question is-I repeat-why did you work so hard to kill the hate-crimes bill?"

He shifted his gown and crossed his legs huffily. "It's a waste of time."

"The bill?"

"People who beat up queers are people who are going to beat up queers. They don't give a good goddamn what the law says."

"Convict a few of them and put their pictures on the front of the Post being led off in chains," I said, "and word will get around. Some of them who'd otherwise do it will think twice.

It'd make a difference, just like the federal civil-rights laws helped end lynching in the South."

"Honey, you live in a dream world," he said, sniffing. "Anyway, if a couple of stupid queens go swishing around down by the docks at three in the morning, maybe they're asking for trouble."

"What if they're swishing around at Seventh and Bleecker at eleven-thirty? Or Third and St. Mark's Place at ten to ten? Are you suggesting that there should be times and places when queer-bashing is restricted and times and places when it's not? How about alternate-side-of-the-street queer-bashing, and violators will have their bricks and lead pipes towed away? You're a dealmaker, Bruno. How's that for a compromise?"

He sighed deeply. "You know goddamn well why I worked against the legislation, Strachey. The man I work for hates fags. The senator believes homosexuality is an abomination and homosexuals are abominable and they deserve whatever they get."

"Whatever'they'get?"

"All right. We."

"Do you share the senator's views, Bruno?"

He reddened and for a long moment said nothing. Then: "I do what everybody does who can get away with it. I get on top and I stay there through any means at my disposal. If you're not doing that, my self-righteous friend, it is because you are weak."

I thought, Oh, hell, he's one of those. Arguing with one was like climbing a greased pole, except less intellectually rewarding.

I said, "Does the senator actually believe that you're not gay, that Rutka's column was a smear campaign by the Democratic minority in the senate?"

He chuckled. "Yes."

"Well, if you don't answer my next question, Bruno, I'm going to march into the senator's office the first time you're not there to guard the door, and I'm going to dump John Rutka's entire dossier on you onto the senator's desk-notes, memos, diaries, audiotapes, videotapes-a veritable Library of Congress of your sexual misadventuring. A lurid mixed-media cavalcade featuring Bruno Slinger and a variety of chaps in their birthday suits, wienies agog. What would you think of that?"

"I would consider it the act of a desperate scumbag. Are you saying there are actual tapes? I find that hard to believe."

"Remember Kevin?" I made this up.

"Oh, God."

"You didn't know you were being taped?" I made this up too. There were no audio or videotapes of anyone in any of Rutka's files.

"I can't remember who would have- Oh, God."

I said, "Tell me who you were with last night."

"That's the other question?"

"That's it. Answer it and then we can talk about the disposition of your file."

He looked more confident now. "The Handbag police chief came into my office today-just walked right in unannounced. If he had stayed a second longer, I would have had to ask the Capitol Police to remove him. The man apparently suspects me of John Rutka's murder. Can you imagine?"

"Of course I can imagine. Practically everybody who knows you can. When Rutka outed you in Cityscape, you told people you were going to rip his balls off. You probably wouldn't even think of it as murder, just real-politik. That's what people think. Did you do it?"

Without batting an eyelash, Slinger said, "John Rutka deserved what he got. He was a danger to society who deserved to be removed from it one way or another. I laughed when I heard he was dead. I was dee-lighted. But of course I had nothing to do with it. I'm not stupid. Too many people would want to pin it on me and I'm far too intelligent to make myself vulnerable by actually committing the noble but unfortunately unlawful deed. No, I did not kill John Rutka, and I can prove it."

"How? What's your alibi for last night?" "I spent the evening with two of Albany's most distinguished citizens. Both of them will vouch for my presence at a small get-together in Colonie from approximately seven P.M. until just before midnight."

"Do these two distinguished citizens have names?" "Ronnie Linkletter and Scooter Raymond." Only in the benighted age in which we live could a local TV weatherman and a pretty-boy dim-bulb anchor on the six o'clock news be described by anyone, even a man with a mind as warped as Bruno Slinger's, as "distinguished."

Scooter Raymond was a recent arrival in Albany, brought in by Channel Eight to replace the ancient, tightly wound Clem Snodgrass after Snodgrass suffered an on-air stroke that left him repeating the words "Back to you, Flossie-Back to you, Flossie

— Back to you, Flossie" twelve or fifteen times before the picture switched to co-anchor Flossie Proctor, a woman normally seen with her head thrown back in inexplicable perpetual ecstasy but who appeared vaguely human for the first time in twenty years the night Clem Snodgrass's neurons began to pop on-camera.

In a line of endeavor where the men are permitted to bear a striking physical resemblance to Joseph Stalin in his tomb but the women are expected to show up every night looking like The Birth of Venus, Flossie Proctor was no kid. There were those who speculated that Flossie's days were numbered now that she shared the anchor desk with a man who had fewer chins than she. I knew nothing of Scooter Raymond other than what I'd learned from Channel Eight's promos welcoming him to the Hometown Folks news team: that Scooter was "an experienced newsgatherer"-like Harrison Salisbury, it was suggested, except twinklier and that Scooter had already begun to think of Albany as his hometown, as if this were an acquired trait. The station had announced additionally that "Scooter is his real name," which few doubted.

I asked Slinger, "Who else was in attendance at this get-together besides you and Ronnie and Scooter?"

"No one, actually," he said casually. "It was a combined work and let-down-your-hair session of the type I often initiate with new media people who come to town. I had the opportunity to brief Scooter on some of the ins and outs of the legislature and its personalities, and at the same time I was able to promote some of the senator's thoughts on directions the state should be taking."

"And Ronnie was there to represent the meteorological point of view, or what?"

"He drove," Slinger said, looking bemused. "Scooter needed a ride, and Ronnie drove."

"To where? Where did this informal information-sharing session take place? In public, I hope."

"Public enough," Slinger said, still looking on top of the game. "We met in a suite that I keep reserved for the senator's use at the Parmalee Plaza Hotel. It's convenient to the airport. Executives and officials from the city can fly in and meet the senator and be back at LaGuardia in an hour."

"So the people who can vouch for your whereabouts last night are Ronnie and Scooter and-who else?"

"Several hotel employees saw us arrive and depart the desk clerk and the night manager, who both know me, among others. There's no doubt I was out there, Strachey. It's easily verifiable."

"Did you tell the Handbag police chief that's where you were?"

"I most certainly did not."

"Why not?"

"Because he had no legal basis for his harassing me in my place of work. It was a goddamn outrage, is what it was."

"You were outraged, but he has a right to question you and he will likely exercise that right."

"If that mealy-mouthed constable wants to talk to me, he can show me a warrant and I'll notify my attorney and we'll see. He won't obtain a warrant, of course, because no judge will issue one without evidence. That I was once angry at John Rutka and said I was so mad I could kill him is not evidence. People say things like that all the time and it's meaningless in court."

Slinger seemed not to know about the anonymous phone calls Bub Bailey had received pointing at Slinger and the one left on my machine telling me that if I wanted to know who killed John Rutka I should find out who Slinger had been with the night before.

If Slinger was telling the truth about spending the evening at the Parmalee Plaza, it seemed likely that someone who worked at the hotel was the mystery caller, though not Zenck or the desk clerk; I would have recognized their voices. The caller, of course, could also have been anyone visiting or staying at the place who had seen Slinger come and go. It could also have been someone else present in the suite whom Slinger had not mentioned.

I said, "Chief Bailey can't make you talk because he hasn't got anything on you. But I do-the files. So, tell me this, Bruno. Who else was in the suite with you and Ronnie and Scooter?"

"No one."

"Did you have sex?"

He grinned hideously.

"The three of you?"

"Scooter watched. He's not gay, he says, but he likes to watch. He loves seeing the weatherman being fucked, he says. At the last place he worked, in Sacramento, he liked to watch the weatherman being fucked."

"I guess this is the result of Reagan-era broadcast deregulation."

"I happen to like fucking slender, angelic-looking young men like Ronnie Linkletter, and Ronnie happens to enjoy being serviced by powerful older men of superior intellect."

"Uh-huh."

"Ronnie's a beauty, isn't he? I consider myself extremely fortunate. I'd been hearing for years that he was a fag but that he was faithful to someone who had won Ronnie's heart with the majesty of his position. Lucky for me, they apparently had some sort of falling-out this summer, and I was able to move in and fill the breach, as it were."

I said, "You don't know who this powerful person was?"

"Ronnie refuses to discuss him, which I appreciate. It means he'll tend to be discreet in what he tells others about me. My motto has always been, If you're going to be indiscreet, be discreet about it. That's why I plan my assignations these days at the Parmalee Plaza. It's gay-run, as you're probably aware, and in return for an occasional remuneration, the night manager will see that his people will keep their mouths shut about who's doing whom out there."

"Right."

"Ronnie used to go to that vomitorium Jay Gladu runs out on Central Avenue, and he tried to get me into it, but I wouldn't set foot in the place. I do safe sex only, for the most part, and it's unsafe just walking in the door of the Fountain of Eden. Have you ever been out there?"

"Not yet," I said. "Why do you use motels? Couldn't you bring your sex partners here?"

"Do you see those photographs?" Slinger said, growing somber and motioning at the lineup on the sideboard.

"They're quite a bunch."

"One picture is missing. It was stolen by a man I brought here once, and it is irreplaceable. The photograph was given to me when I was very young, and it had on it a warm greeting to me from a very great man. Would you like to know who it was?"

"Yes, who?"

"Henry Pu Yi, the last emperor of China."

"Oh."

"Briefly, we were lovers."

"Were you mentioned in the movie?"

"No."

"Well, then-I guess that made the photo even more important. Your only memento."

"That's why I never bring people I don't trust into my home."

I said, "Do you only have sex with people you don't trust?"

I'd have felt pretty demeaned if somebody had asked me that question, but Slinger just shrugged and said, "It's the best way of knowing what to expect from people," and then he dropped the subject.

"I'm not going to give you your file," I said.

"I'm not surprised."

"But after John Rutka's killer is caught, I'm going to destroy them all."

"Oh? How will I be certain that you've done it? I have no reason to trust you, Strachey."

"You'll never know for sure. I'm sorry about that." "No, you're not. You're not sorry at all." "Okay, you're right. In your case, Bruno, I'm not sorry at all."

He sneered contentedly.

I left Slinger's house and went out into the clammy night air. The headache I'd had earlier in the day was gone, but now my stomach was churning. It was partly because I'd had only a Mars bar for dinner, but not entirely.

I made my call to New York on behalf of Mike Sciola from the phone in the cubbyhole under the stairs. In the age of AIDS, the murder of friends and lovers dying horribly is an act of mercy so common as to border on respectability-in a saner world United Way would be putting out brochures on the subject-and I had no trouble making the arrangements Mike had asked for. end user