Tongue tied

Chapter 10

Julius, on West Tenth Street, had been a West Village tavern since the 1840s, when the Village was a village, and gay since the 1950s, a pre-Stonewall Mount Rushmore of Manhattan gay life. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt were three-deep at the bar when I arrived just before six to meet Lyle Barner and his boyfriend Dave Welch.

Barner had told me earlier on the phone that he had chosen Julius to meet in because it was friendly and it had good burgers. It would also be helpful for Dave to be reminded that not every homosexual in New York had been born last week, and that gay life could be about living comfortably in an unfair world and not pressing to change it twenty-four hours a day. It was also a bar, I knew, where hip neighborhood straights sometimes hung out. So Barner, anxious in all-gay venues, could retain the shred of closet-edness he seemed to require.

I half expected Welch to show up pierced and purple-haired, with the words QUEER

BEER tattooed across his exposed buttocks, but when they came in together he resembled a younger version of Lyle Barner. Out of his patrolman's uniform, in Nikes, jeans and a blue-and-white striped polo shirt, Welch was thick and muscular, with a big head of bristly black hair that was only a little longer than his dark shadow of a beard.

He smelled of precinct-house locker-room-shower soap, suggesting that he had just recently been naked, an additionally pleasing image.

Welch smiled at me slyly and said, "Lyle tells me you're assisting the department's detective division on the Moyle kidnapping. You're a fine citizen, Don."

"I'm just helping out in a small way," I said. "I once had a brief encounter with the Forces of Free Faggotry. Under the circumstances, that makes me one of North America's foremost experts on the FFF."

"Yeah, you and the Dutchman," Barner put in.

"I hope," Welch said, "that somebody can get to this Moyle asshole quick, because he's such a shit-for-brains homophobe that he might be too stupid to keep his mouth shut, and the FFFers could lose it and mess him up. My sympathies are with the FFF people, and I'd hate to see them all end up in Attica for the rest of their young lives."

"What makes you think they're young?" I asked.

"Their jokes, their language, their anger. I've done work with a gay youth group in Hempstead, out where I live on the Island, and some of these kids are very angry and very out of control. Lyle showed me copies of the notes the FFF sent to Jay Plankton, and I recognized the style-basically, 'Mess with me and I'll hurt you or I'll hurt myself.'"

"I share your low opinion of Leo Moyle," I said, "and he's certainly a man who can incite rage. But the FFF people, young or old, strike me as more flaky than violent. So far, anyway, they've been more gonzo than vicious. More Hunter Thompson than Charles Manson."

"Kidnapping is itself violent," Welch said. "Anybody capable of inflicting that kind of terror is capable of inflicting any kind."

Barner had now snagged the bartender's eye, and we each ordered a draft.

I said, "The old FFF members were not only nonviolent, one of them was actually Amish, as Lyle is likely to have pointed out. So it does seem improbable that any of them are mixed up in this current anti-J-Bird mayhem. Though people sometimes do change over the years."

"The Amish guy sounds like a solid citizen," Welch said. "Though even there you can't put too much faith in a label."

Barner said, "There are even Amish heroin addicts now. There was a bust in Ohio a couple of years ago."

"Lyle, I examined Thad Diefendorfer's arm. I saw no needle tracks."

"Anyway," Barner said, watching me, "Diefendorfer is clean. I ran him, and I talked to the chief in Burns Ford, where he lives. The chief asked around, and he went over and checked out Diefendorfer's farm. There aren't any llamas, and no sign that Moyle might be being held there."

I gazed at Barner. "Was that necessary?"

"What?"

"Hassling these gay Amish. This decent man who showed up on his own to offer information."

"What information?" Barner said, trying to look irked. "A twenty-year-old list that we're supposed to go chasing after? Sure, something on the list could pan out. Or the list could be to throw us off. I don't know about you, Strachey, but in my experience every lead has to be followed. Even leads where I feel like getting in the suspect's pants but I'm too professional to do such a thing."

My guilt fell away like an old scab. Working ahead of and around Barner now felt not only like the fairest method for dealing with the FFF, but like the most effective way to proceed with the kidnapping investigation. Barner had obviously been addled into temporary incompetence by his jealousy. Scamming him also seemed to be exactly the duplicitous treatment that he had coming.

I said to Welch, "Lyle thinks I've got something going with Thad Diefendorfer, a man I met for the first time this morning. But he has misread the situation. I'm interested in Diefendorfer's political and organizational history, not his-"

I paused, and Welch cut in with, "Pale eyes, clear skin and sturdy outdoorsman's physique?"

"How did you know that?"

"Lyle told me," Welch said, and grinned. "Me, I don't have Lyle's training and experience. But any of these old FFFers sound like they need to be vetted, and Diefendorfer comes across as an excellent resource. Even if none of the old FFFers turn out to be good suspects, younger people who they know might be. I know a little bit about the movement-I've done some organizing with gay officers in the department-and I had never even heard of the FFF until they started yanking the J-Bird's chain."

"Dave, that's why I brought Strachey into it," Barner said. Our beers had been set on the bar, and Welch reached through the knot of men in after-work jackets and ties and handed the glasses out one by one.

Welch raised his glass to Lyle and said, "Credit where credit is due. I'm talking as if I knew a lot more about criminal investigations than the stuff I've learned from Lyle, but I don't. I've taken a few courses at Hofstra, but if I ever make detective, most of what will get me there I'll have gotten from Lyle, a good teacher and a good cop, and a good baby-that's-not-all." Welch winked at me, and Barner colored and looked pleased.

"Can you make detective if you're out in the department?" I asked. "Lyle says you've had kind of a rough time."

"Yeah, kind of," Welch said. "I've had human shit packed into my shoes. My locker's been painted pink. My service revolver was tossed in a laundry basket and a Jeff Stryker dildo stuffed in my holster in its place. Other hilarious pranks like that. I've filed formal complaints seventeen times, and every time I complain, the complaint is filed and I'm written up for causing morale problems in the precinct. So, can I make detective under these circumstances? Not under this mayor and commissioner, no. But things are improving a little bit at a time. I know there are a lot of gay cops in the department, and the more of them who come out and say they're not gonna put up with this shit, that helps."

Both of us were careful not to look at Barner, who was busy watching us being careful not to look at him.

It was Barner who said, "In a way, it really sucks that we're the ones trying to bail out the J-Bird's homophobic ass. The meanest clowns in the precinct are big J-Bird fans, and they've always got him and Moyle and those other morons on the squad-room radio in the morning."

"It's a fucking rotten way to start the workday," Welch said, and raised his beer glass.

"Here's to Leo Moyle's reeducation at the hands of the FFF before his safe return to the New York airwaves." We drank to that.

Barner asked me how I'd made out tracking down old FFFers, and I told him truthfully that I hadn't come up with much yet. "I talked to one guy in Cleveland and two others in Los Angeles who had fond memories of their FFF days. They talked the way Timothy Callahan and his Peace Corps buddies carry on when they get together-the VFP, Veterans of Foreign Peace. Lots of stories from the sixties- oft told, I'd guess, with a sardonic warm glow and a certain amount of editing and refining.

"These old FFF guys had not heard of the kidnapping, they said, and I believed them.

They were unhappy- disgusted even-with the FFF name having been taken up by kidnappers. All three said they couldn't imagine any of the old gang doing such a thing, and none could think of any radical Gen Xers they knew who might adopt the name and carry out FFF kidnappings or tear-gas attacks."

I told Barner that I had not yet been able to reach most of the people on my FFF list which one of the LA contacts had added two names to-but that I would keep slogging away, and even visit two former FFFers who were living in the Northeast, one in central New York state and one in Connecticut. Barner asked me about Kurt Zinsser, the FFFer I met in Denver in seventy-nine while working on the Blount case, and I said Zinsser apparently was no longer in Denver, and no one I had spoken to knew what had become of the old new-lefty.

"I've got something to tell you, and you're not going to like it," Barner said.

"Not like what?"

"I got hold of the FBI file on the FFF."

"That might help. What's not to like?"

"You're in it."

Welch said, "Hey, a man with an FBI file. You must be doing something right, Don.

Unless you're in the KKK, NAMBLA or the Eagle Forum."

"What am I doing in the FFF's file? I know I've got an antiwar file, but FFF? Have you got a copy of it?"

"Back at the precinct," Lyle said. "It's not that you were FFF. It's about Kurt Zinsser and the Blount case. Zinsser and the FFF rescued Billy Blount from the funny farm his parents put him in when he was a kid, and later you rescued Blount from his parents when they tried to use the phony murder charge to have him committed a second time.

Did you know that afterwards the senior Blounts tried to have you charged with obstruction of justice?"

"No."

"They did. Stuart Blount and his lawyer, Jay Tarbell."

"Tarbell. That slug. I ran into him on Washington Avenue last week. He came out of the Fort Orange Club, patted his new Mercedes 230 SL on the hood ornament, and winked at me."

Barner said, "In January 1980, the US attorney turned the case over to the FBI. The bureau looked at the thing, and the investigating agents concluded you had probably broken an undetermined number of laws in the course of clearing Billy Blount of the Steve Kleckner murder. But they weren't sure which laws they might have been.

The assistant prosecutor in charge doubted his office could make obstruction of justice stick, so the top man decided to pass, in spite of pressure from Tarbell and Albany city hall."

"Bill Keck," I said. "A Jimmy Carter appointee who always struck me as a reasonable man. I never knew just how reasonable."

Welch was looking at me intently. He said, "Lyle described you as some kind of anarchist. A hippie without the incense and the love beads. But it sounds as if you knew exactly what you were doing, and you were nimble as hell."

Anarchist? Hippie? Were? "I've managed to right a few wrongs over the years in a borderline sort of way and still stay out of Leavenworth. I've also wronged a few rights, but we don't need to get into those."

Barner snorted and said, "I'll say."

"What else is in the FBI report on the FFF?" I asked. "I'd like to see it."

"Stop by the precinct and I'll make you a copy," Barner said. "But overall it's the same names Diefendorfer gave us, and not even as up-to-date. The file is fun to read, though.

I wish I had the cojones to pull off some of the stunts the old FFF guys got away with."

We both looked at Welch, who I guessed we all knew had a similar wish for Barner.

But Welch just said, "I'd like to read the report, too, but later. I've gotta be somewhere at eight-thirty."

Barner tensed, and I guessed I knew what that meant. While we had burgers, Barner told stories of some of the old FFF's more daring exploits as described in the FBI files, and then Welch departed. As I left with Barner for his office and then my train back to Albany, I asked Barner if Welch had a date with someone else.

"There are two of them," Barner said. "Dave asked me to come along, but I'm not into that. He's asked me several times, even though he knows that's not what I want in a relationship. They're constantly doing poppers and shit like that. The three of them also use other substances, Dave admitted to me one time, that no police officer should get anywhere near, personally speaking. This isn't for me, Stra-chey. I want Dave, I go for Dave, but this is not who I am."

I wondered if Barner had figured out that, since Welch repeatedly offered things that were repugnant to Barner, the offer was either a cruel taunt or perhaps not sincerely meant. Now I was feeling sorry for Barner and guilty all over again.