Third man out

24

The story was too late for the Times Union's deadline, but Joel McClurg called in his staff at eleven Friday night and paid his printer a cash bonus out of his own pocket, and on Saturday morning the weekly Cityscape put out the first extra in its history.

Father Morgan was to have been arraigned at nine A.M., but all the Albany judges recused themselves and plans were made for a late-afternoon hearing to be presided over by a Presbyterian judge driving in from Erie County. A diocesan attorney would say only that Father Morgan would plead not guilty to the murder charge. The lawyer refused to comment on "related allegations," meaning the report in Cityscape of "antigay Bishop Mortimer McFee's history of homosexual assignations that were brought to light by Handbag police and by Albany private investigator Donald Strachey in the John Rutka murder investigation."

By nine Saturday morning, the comatose truck driver had been moved across the hall to the bed occupied until the night before by Stu Meserole, and the bishop's room had a police guard and a diocesan PR flack by the door. "The outrageous statements about the bishop that were published in a radical publication may be actionable," the PR man told the fifteen or twenty reporters who showed up, but he said he wasn't going to "dignify the report by getting into specifics."

The funeral mass for John Rutka at St. Michael's in Handbag was now news, too. The local mainstream print reporters and the TV knuckleheads were there in force, racing to catch up with Cityscape. I also recognized in rear pews the Albany bureau chiefs of The New York Times, Newsday, and a free-lancer I knew who had been trying for years to sell something to the National En-quirer. He was beaming.

I arrived with Timmy and referred all questions by reporters to Bub Bailey, who in turn advised the press to attend the arraignment that afternoon for a full reading of the charges and a presentation of evidence.

Bub pulled me aside and said, "Thanks for your help."

"Always glad to lend a hand to a professional."

"I've wanted to nail him for years."

"Father Morgan? He's killed other people too? What do you mean?"

"Nah, the bishop. When he was in Handbag, he always had a boyfriend-usually underage. Three fathers came to me over the years he was in Handbag and said McFee was molesting their sons, but when I'd talk to the boys, they'd refuse to cooperate.

McFee was shrewd. He'd spot the ones who were gay-whether they knew it yet or not-and he'd-what do you call it?"

"Bring them out."

"This one kid absolutely refused to press charges, but he told me the whole thing. McFee convinced him he was rotten and sinful and corrupt, and then McFee took advantage. The kid believed he was rotten and corrupt, because he knew by then where his sexual interests were and McFee knew too and had him in his power. It must have been hell for those boys. He's an evil man, and he's no Christian, and the humiliation being heaped on him now is what he's had coming for a long, long time."

I looked Bailey hard in the eye. "You knew before I did that McFee was mixed up in this?"

"Nope. How could I? I didn't have John Rutka's famous files to help me in my investigation. They're in Utica, remember?"

His expression didn't change at all. "But you knew where to look even without the files, and who to talk to. I guess you're smarter than I am."

I said nothing.

"It's just a shame John Rutka isn't alive to see justice done," Bailey said. "I'm reasonably certain he was one of McFee's adolescent victims and that's what drove young John to expose exploiters and phonies. I wonder why he didn't out McFee sooner?

If he had the goods on Ronnie Linkletter, he must have had the same goods on McFee."

"Who'd have believed him?" I said. "Linkletter and all the people at the motel would have denied everything. And the bishop was held in such high esteem that the community would have been outraged by the accusation, and Rutka might just have had some awful accident, or he'd have been pounded senseless by a couple of Albany police detectives who claimed he resisted arrest in a drug deal. Even though McFee may have been the man he most wanted to get, that's one outing Rutka couldn't have gotten away with."

"I suppose you're right."

"It's only with the pressure of the murder investigation," I said, "that all the principals are being forced to tell what they know and the bishop is being revealed as a mega-hypocrite. Without the murder investigation, it could never have happened."

"It's a cruel irony," Bailey said, shaking his head. "It's a good thing, too, that you happened along to solve the case. I doubt I could have done it on my own-me not being nearly as smart as you are, Mr. Strachey."

"Give me a break," I said. "Okay, so I've got the files. You knew all along I had them, didn't you?"

He laughed.

"Anyway," I said, "I didn't just happen along. John Rutka hired me after he'd been shot in the foot and his house was firebombed.

Of course, it turned out he and Sandifer had been behind all that."

"The way it turned out," Bailey said, "it's almost as if he'd planned the whole thing-to expose the evil McFee. Rutka was a devious kid and I wouldn't put anything past him. But I don't suppose he would sacrifice his own life even to get McFee. McFee isn't worth it."

"No, you're right. He isn't."

Inside the church, Ann Rutka was seated in a front pew with her three teenaged children, and behind her were fifteen or twenty people Bub Bailey said were cousins, employees of the hardware store, and the family attorney, David Rizzuto. I sat on the opposite side of the aisle with Timmy and Bailey. Up ahead of us were Eddie Sandifer and five men in Queer Nation T-shirts.

Sandifer turned around once and spotted me. He gave me thumbs-up and mouthed what I thought was "Thank you."

The mass, said by the St. Michael's rector, was meditative and serene and accepting of life's vicissitudes, and the Queer Nation crowd sat there and kept quiet. The priest's eulogy made no specific mention of John Rutka's politics or sexual orientation but did refer once to his being a man who "wanted to help the downtrodden."

At the conclusion of the service, the coffin was carried out by six of the cousins, Rutka's Queer Nation friends apparently not having been asked to participate.

Outside, I asked Sandifer why he and his friends, who had been so central to Rutka's life, had been so peripheral to the ceremony marking his death.

"He's gone now," Sandifer said unemotionally. "What difference would it make? John told me a long time ago that when his time came he wouldn't mind being buried by his family and laid to rest with his parents. He said himself it would make other people happy, and what difference could it make to him?"

"I'm a little surprised, though, that he didn't insist on a nonchurch send-off," I said. "Knowing what we know now."

"I guess I'm a little surprised too," Sandifer said, and then thanked me for the investigative work I'd done. "I'm going to pay you for your work, too. I've talked to the Rutkas' lawyer, and he'll send you a check when he receives your bill. John was going to pay you and I think he'd want me to do the same. I'm going back to New York. The only reason I came to Albany in the first place was to be with John. But you'll be paid, Strachey."

"If you can afford it, fine. There's no rush, though."

"It won't be long," he said. "Just send the bill to Dave Rizzuto." Sandifer drifted off to the Queer Nation group where they were being animatedly chatted up by Timmy, a nominal Jesuit but actual Platonist who was always ready to let the question lead where it might, short of poor taste.

There was to be no graveside service, just a family brunch at the Rutka house, and I went over to beg off on the family get-together and to wish Ann well in her struggles. Between drags from a Chesterfield, she introduced me to lawyer Dave Rizzuto, who congratulated me on finding the killer and then excused himself and said he had to be on the tennis court in twenty minutes, no offense meant. Ann said she wasn't offended, just envious of anybody who had the time to do anything just for the fun of it.

When Rizzuto was gone, Ann began to thank me profusely for my help, and I said, "I thought after a point I'd be doing it as a public service, but it turned out that won't be necessary. Eddie's going to pay me my usual fee. Of course, he hasn't seen the bill yet."

She laughed. "Oh, he'll be able to handle it. Now that he's rich."

"He is? How did that happen? I thought John just left him a few thousand dollars."

"Dave Rizzuto told me this morning there's a huge life insurance policy with Eddie as the beneficiary. John took it out about a year ago. Dave set it up through his brother's insurance agency, that's how he knows about it. In a week or so, Eddie will be about eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars rich. How's that for not getting left in the lurch? Eddie didn't even know about it until yesterday."

I said, "D.R."

"What's that?"

"John's financial records show fourteen thousand dollars in cash disbursements over the past year to a D.R.- Dave Rizzuto. Why would he have paid in cash, though, and not by check, for a legitimate insurance policy?"

I thought I knew the answer to my own question, but I let Ann, who knew her lawyer, say it. "Hey," she said, "you know how some lawyers are. It was probably Dave's idea. The more untraceable cash they have floating around, the more they can cook the books and not pay taxes on actual income. It was probably part of some complicated scheme of Dave's and his brother's. By going along with it, John probably got a break on the premiums. It's just the way most people do business these days, that's all.

It's a lot harder in the hardware business not to be honest, but you know lawyers."

"Well," I said, "eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars doesn't buy what it used to buy, but it's still a decent piece of change."

"Yeah," she said with a raised eyebrow, "especially in Mexico."

"Mexico?"

"Dave says the money is going to be forwarded to a Mexican bank in New York. I didn't say anything to Eddie, because I didn't think this was supposed to be any of my business, and I'm probably not supposed to be telling you. So don't say anything to Eddie. But eight hundred fifty thousand dollars must be about a zillion pesos."

Timmy came over and said, "Eddie says good-bye and thanks again. They're all headed back to New York now."

"He's leaving right away?"

"He's leaving John's car for his niece and he's riding with his friends from New York. They're just stopping at the house to pick up his things."

"Eddie packed up most of his belongings last night," Ann said. "I stopped over and we talked. It meant a lot to both of us, I think.

He said such sweet things about John. I cried all over again."

Sandifer and the Queer Nation group were climbing into two cars, one a commodious old Buick station wagon. I excused myself and walked over to Bub Bailey, who was talking with a couple of Rutka cousins.

"Got a minute?"

He followed me back into the shadows of the church entryway.

"Tell me again," I said, "how the pathologist identified John Rutka's body."

"Why? You don't think that's John in the hearse?"

"I guess it must be. Forensic pathologists don't make mistakes, do they?"

"Only very rarely."

"Oh. Only very rarely."

He said, "There was the circumstantial evidence, of course-the wallet, and some traces of clothing. A belt buckle, I think. Then there was the chipped ankle bone from the gunshot wound. The clincher was the dental work. John's records were with Dr.

Glossner right here in Handbag and the mouth on that corpse was indisputably Rutka's."

I saw the filthy glass half full of cloudy water on a shelf by the sink in John Rutka's bathroom. I said, "The mouth was John Rutka's, or just the teeth in it? Rutka didn't wear dentures, did he?"

Bailey thought about this. "I don't know. He would have been kind of young. The report just said the pathologist's findings were consistent with the dental records submitted by Dr. Glossner."

I trotted over and caught Ann Rutka as she was climbing into her car. I said quietly, so that her bored- and irritated-looking children could not hear, "Bub Bailey and I are just tying up a couple of loose ends, and we have a peculiar question."

"Go ahead."

"Did your brother wear dentures?"

"Oh, God, yes. Since he was twenty. The dummy practically lived on candy bars, and when he was a kid getting him to brush his teeth was like-pulling teeth. In fact, that's what Dr. Glossner did. John's teeth were so rotten by the time he finished nursing school that Dr. Glossner pulled them all out and gave John dentures. He never seemed to mind, though. By then I guess he had other things on his mind besides what he looked like when he went to bed and got up. Why do you ask?"

"Just something about the pathologist's report. But that clears it up," I said. "One other thing. When John was a nurse at St.

Vincent's, what kind of nursing did he do? What unit did he work in? Do you know?"

"For a long time John worked in critical care," she said. "And then later with AIDS patients. Eddie says John was one of the best they had. He knew what he was doing, and he cared. I'm sure it's true. When John believed in something, there was no stopping him."

"It must have been devastating to him when he was fired from the hospital."

"It was hard on him, yes, but I think he never regretted what he was fired for-taking morphine to give to AIDS patients who were in pain. Anyway, John wasn't fired from the hospital. He just wasn't allowed to work as a nurse anymore. He was so well thought of he was kept on in the hospital for several months as some kind of junior administrator until he moved back up to Handbag. Whatever mistakes he made, John was still appreciated."

"What did he do in the hospital after he left nursing?" I asked.

"He worked in the morgue. Creepy, huh? Not for this Rutka, I'll tell ya. In fact, some of John's best friends who came to the funeral worked in the morgue, too." We looked out toward the street in time to see the station wagon and the other car from the city just pulling away. "Well," Ann said, "I've got a house full of cousins to feed, so I'd better hit the road. Stop in the store sometime when you get a chance. And thanks again for all your good work. I don't know this Father Morgan they say killed John, but it doesn't surprise me at all that Bishop McFee had something to do with it. He always seemed to be mad at somebody or something. I guess it was himself."

We said good-bye and I went back over to Bub Bailey. "He wore dentures. He used to work in a morgue in New York. That crew that just pulled out of here, they work in a morgue in New York. They could have filched a male corpse Rutka's size-New York is overflowing with homeless dead people nobody knows or cares about- and chipped the ankle bone and substituted Rutka's dentures for the dead man's dental work. The crude surgery would have been covered up by the effects of the fire.

"Then, all they needed to do to pin the 'murder' on Father Morgan was tear off some of the white Chrysler's mud flap and leave it at the abduction scene. And then make a couple of anonymous, knowing phone calls to you and to me directing us to Slinger, and then to Linkletter, and then onward to the bishop for his grand outing."

"It'd be something John Rutka might dream up."

"That's what I think."

"He was always a boy who kept people on their toes." end user