Strachey's Folly - Stevenson Richard. Страница 23

Mosel had shut her notebook, but now she was flipping its cover up and down absently. Hively's refusal to be used as a source for anything he had told her was plainly driving Mosel nuts. She blurted out, "Oh, come on, Bud. Let me have the names. I promise I'll keep you out of it and I can check them out discreetly."

"You can? I doubt that that's possible." "All right, so maybe it wouldn't be so discreet. But I won't mention your name. I can just call these guys up and say, 'I heard you dated Jim Suter and it ended unhappily, and do you have any idea how a panel with Suter's name on it made its way into the AIDS quilt?' Maybe I won't find anybody who'll admit it, but I might come across a Suter hater who knows who did do it, and who's mad at that guy, too, and who'll rat on him to the Post."

I said, "That sounds like a promising approach to me."

Hively slowly massaged his hairless head, as if to stimulate the cells responsible for decision making. "We can't be sure, of course, even that it was one of Jim's wounded lovers who sent in the quilt panel. The quilt stunt could be totally unrelated. And if it was an old boyfriend who did it, why would he and some­body else then vandalize the panel at the D.C. display?"

"To call attention to it," Timmy said. "So nobody in Wash­ington would miss the act of revenge."

Hively let loose with a little sigh and said, "I guess you might as well go ahead. I'll give you the names. Just don't tell anybody the names came from me."

"Agreed," Mosel said. "I'm wondering something, Bud. Is there any particular reason, other than mere privacy, why you don't want these guys to know it was you who ID-ed them as former Suter boyfriends?"

Hively laughed. "It's not the ex-lovers I'm worried about. The problem is, I already gave the names to the Blade reporter covering the quilt display, and I don't want her to find out I also turned the names over to the Post."

"I guess I'm going to have to work fast," Mosel said dryly.

"Anyway, thanks."

Hively grew serious and said, "I'm telling you because I want to do everything I can to help expose the person who used the quilt in such a shabby way. I've got too many friends on there not to care a lot about this. I know that in the big pic­ture the quilt is indestructible, and what it means is indestruc­tible. But this was a miserable, selfish stunt, and it just hurts. I'm sure an awful lot of people have been sickened by it."

"I think so, too," Mosel said, "and so does my editor. That's

why it's news."

As Bud Hively described the five men whose detestation of Jim Suter was, Hively believed, abiding and even potentially vi­olent, Mosel took notes on—and I carefully memorized—the sketches of Jim Suter's attenuated love affairs with Martin Dormer, Graham Houston, Jason Leibowicz, Bill Walker, and Peter Vicknicki.

As Hively spoke, I listened for any biographical suggestion that any of these men might be connected, however slightly, to Betty or Nelson Krumfutz, to Maynard, or to Mexico. I didn't hear any. But I picked up plenty of data to serve as a conversational icebreaker with Jim Suter, well-known Washington writer, heart­throb, and—the word that came to mind was an oddly old-fashioned one—cad.

Chapter 13

By four Monday afternoon, I was back in the hotel room working the phone. Timmy had the list of Jim Suter's fam­ily and friends that Bud Hively had given Dana Mosel on Sun­day, and I had the names of the five embittered Suter ex-lovers that Hively had described to Mosel earlier on Monday. After sev­eral unproductive calls—answering machines and services, or no answer at all—I reluctantly called the airline and postponed my reservation to Cancun from Tuesday to Wednesday morning. I immediately felt pangs of regret, even irritation—mixed with a strange but powerful sense of relief—that I would not be leav­ing for the Yucatan first thing in the morning. But at the time I didn't realize what those pangs meant.

I was able to reach two of Jim Suter's friends, as well as his mother and brother in Maryland. With the friends and relatives I identified myself as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. This was a low subterfuge that would have disgusted my journalist friends but which I justified by Suter's own alleged precarious life-or-death situation. Admitting that I was a private detective might have tipped off one of the people Suter was afraid of that some­one besides Maynard might be aware of Suter's terrible danger.

I guessed, though, that the angry ex-lovers would be un­willing to speak with a reporter, so I told the two I reached late Sunday afternoon that I was a private investigator employed by Jim's mother to look into the disturbing AIDS quilt panel. Timmy termed this particular lie "squalid," but he couldn't come up with an approach that was morally superior.

Anyway, it worked. By 5 p.m. Monday, I had interviews lined up with Suter's mother and brother at six-thirty, with Peter Vick-nicki and Martin Dormer, two of Suter's angry former lovers, later in the evening, as well as two of Suter's friends at lunchtime Tuesday.

Timmy phoned his boss, state assemblyman Myron Lip-shutz, in Albany and requested several days off "for personal rea­sons. " He told the politician he was unable to explain exactly what was going on, but he said he wanted Lipshutz to know how gratifying it had been working for him over the years and how much respect and affection he felt for the assemblyman.

It was obvious from Timmy's end of the rest of the conver­sation—"No, don't worry, I'm fine, Myron, really"—that Lipshutz had been unnerved by Timmy's remarks, which could easily have been interpreted as (a) a prelude to suicide, (b) the veiled announcement of a fast-moving terminal illness, or (c) an indi­cation that Timmy had fallen under the influence of Deepak Chopra.

Afterward, I said, "It sounds as if you may have scared Myron to death."

"I guess I did leave him a little bit shaken. I didn't mean to frighten Myron. But after what happened to Maynard, I've got this heightened sense of the fragility of human existence—every­body's, including my own—and I feel impelled to tell people how I feel about them before it's too late."

I had never been seized by the need to exclaim my love to anyone other than my lover—for a WASP Presbyterian from New Jersey, that was chore enough—but I liked that Timmy could be selectively, though not promiscuously, spontaneous with his af­fections. He didn't need to tell me how he felt about me—he'd done it countless times over the years with all the force and clar­ity of his strong Irish heart—but he did tell me yet again, and I replied unexpectedly in kind. We made love, and it was excel­lent.

Soon, though, my mind divided, and part of it began to wrestle with ways of clearing up the Jim Suter-Maynard Sudbury complex mystery at the earliest possible moment, and of extrieating Timmy and me—and Maynard—from it. Just as I did not want to live in a state of fear and paranoia, neither did I want to live with—or to live with a man with—a twenty-four-hour-a-day overwhelming sense of doom. As Timmy and I excitedly gener­ated sweat and other fluids, I also couldn't seem to help imag­ining, a bit guiltily, my upcoming encounter with the beringleted former wrestling star, Jim Suter, although I did that only for a fleeting moment.

My six-thirty meeting with Jim Suter's mother and brother at Mrs. Suter's condo in Silver Spring was not only unhelpful in any specific way—neither George nor Lila Suter knew much about Jim's private life, they told me several times—but I immediately sensed that both of them were continually lying, at least by omis­sion.