Strachey's Folly - Stevenson Richard. Страница 29

I said no, but I thought Mr. McChesney would be interested in speaking with me about a missing person. The receptionist, an attractive green-eyed redhead who smelled of frangipani blos­soms, spoke briefly on the phone. Then she said to me, "I'm sorry, but Mr. McChesney is with the congressman just now."

"Which one?"

"Which congressman is he with?"

"Right."

"With Congressman Olds," she said, and gave me an odd look.

"Do you have any idea how long he'll be in there? I'm sure everybody here is on a tight schedule, but I won't take more than five or ten minutes of Mr. McChesney's time."

"I can leave word that you stopped in, Mr. Strachey, and if you'd like to leave a phone number where we can reach you, we can probably set something up."

"I guess I'll hang around and hope for the best. If you men­tion Jim Suter's name, that should speed up the process. Would you mind giving that a try?"

The woman shifted uncomfortably—was I merely rude or a dangerous loony?—and then she got back on the phone. I stud­ied the walls festooned with plaques and citations—from Illinois business and civic groups, from petroleum, chemical, and farm organizations. There were dozens of framed photos, in which Burton Olds, tall, muscular, and pinch-faced, was pictured with a variety of GOP present and former Illinois and national office­holders. Here he was with George and Barbara Bush, over there with Ron and Nancy in palmier days. In other shots Olds posed soberly alongside a grave-faced, bearded man I first thought might be the Reagan surgeon general C. Everett Koop, but who, on closer inspection, turned out to be the mechanical Abraham Lincoln at Disney World. Goofy was discernible in the dim back­ground. There were also photos of Olds shaking hands with several foreign leaders, two of them Mexican: former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the current president, Ernesto Zedillo.

I seated myself and picked up a copy of Time just as a door opened and a beefy, square-faced man appeared. The recep­tionist indicated to him with a nod that I was the schedule in­terrupter.

"I understand you want to talk to Alan McChesney about Jim Suter." His tone wasn't hostile but it was far from friendly.

"Yes, if I may, please."

"Alan has a few minutes he can spare you. Follow me. I'm Ian Williamson."

I sensed that I was expected to know who Williamson was—as in "Hello, I'm Count Leo Tolstoy"—but neither his name nor his face was familiar.

I followed Williamson through a warren of cubicles and small offices and into a larger office with a window overlooking Independence Avenue and the Capitol grounds. Williamson rapped twice on a polished wooden door, which opened im­mediately, and a man strode out, quickly and quietly closing the door behind him. He brusquely indicated a straight-backed chair—the petitioner's seat—that directly faced the broad, heavy desk that he seated himself behind. Then he said to me coldly, "Is this some kind of shakedown?"

"Nope."

"I hope not."

"I'm a private investigator, not a criminal."

"I've met people who are both."

"So have I. But I'm not one of them."

"Mm-hmm."

McChesney gazed at me appraisingly while Williamson leaned against the doorframe, his thick arms folded. McChesney was forty-five or so with a chiseled face that was as hard and smooth as polished stone. His trim body had been carefully packaged in a black silk suit, and he wore a necktie with a subtle-hued, kaleidoscopic design that I suspected might reflect his personality as well as his politics.

"What makes you think I might have criminal designs?" I asked. "Have I got that reputation around the United States Capitol?"

"No," McChesney said, "you have no reputation whatever around the United States Capitol. But Jim Suter's name means trouble, and you bullied your way in here using Suter's name as an implied threat. I'd like to know what you meant by that. I haven't got much time to spare, so let's have it."

"I'm trying to locate Suter. I'm a private investigator, and a client, whose name I can't divulge, wants to contact Suter. It's ru­mored that he's in Mexico, and since you're reported to have in­troduced Jim to his current boyfriend, your friend Jorge Ramos, I thought you might know where the two of them are."

McChesney quickly shook his head and said, "You should go into politics, Strachey. 'It is rumored . . . you are reported ..." You spew out this squid's-ink cloud of innuendo, and I'm sup­posed to tremble and gulp and confess all. Do you really think I'm that easy?"

"I hoped you might be."

"You're from—where?"

"Albany, New York."

"That's a grown-up political town. You should know better."

"Let's try this another way, then, that doesn't insult your in­telligence, McChesney. You mentioned that Jim Suter's name means trouble. Which trouble did you have in mind?"

"Jim Suter is a sadist," McChesney said without hesitation. "He tortures men emotionally by seducing and abandoning them. He did it to me and hundreds of others, and if you meet him, he'll more than likely do it to you. I don't know if you're straight or gay, but either way he'll charm the pants off you—fig­uratively if you're heterosexual, literally if you're homosexual. Then, when you're hooked—and you will be, you will be— he'll turn his back on you and never take you seriously again, or ever speak to you again if he can get away with it. Jim is like some Christian-right caricature of a sick, cold-blooded, compul­sively promiscuous American homosexual man. And if that's not trouble by any definition, I don't know what is."

Williamson, still leaning on the doorframe with his arms folded, looked a little sickened by McChesney's description of Suter, which left no room for sympathy for Suter's current alleged plight—which, in any case, I was still honor-bound not to men­tion.

I said, "I am gay, and I stand forewarned—by you and by others. But if Suter is so reprehensible, McChesney, how come you introduced him to your friend Jorge Ramos? That doesn't sound very nice."

"No, it wasn't nice," McChesney said icily. "Nor was it meant to be nice. I'll spare you the sordid details, but please take my word for it that Jorge Ramos and Jim Suter deserve each other. Getting them together wasn't as horrible a revenge as I've some­times fantasized about for Jim. But for the time being it will have to do. Jorge and I, I should add, are no longer friends. I cut all my ties with Jorge months ago, when I discovered exactly what he was."

"Which was what?"

McChesney just looked at me.

"Was Jorge also an emotional sadist of some kind?"

"You could put it that way," McChesney said, and then his mouth clamped shut.

"Is it true that Suter is Mexico?"

"I wouldn't know because I haven't seen or been in touch with Jim Suter in months—a good year probably. But if Jorge got him. down to Cancun and got his hooks in him, Jim may well have stayed. Even if after three days he and Jorge had had enough of each other, romantically speaking."

"What kind of hooks does Jorge have that he gets into people?"

"He's a hustler and a scam artist. Most of it's quasi-legitimate, but I suspect a lot of it's not—oversold vacation-condo time-share operations and the like. Drugs? Probably, once in a while, if a deal is foolproof. It's where the big easy money is made in Mexico. Every year forty billion dollars' worth of recreational narcotics passes through Mexico from South America to North America's fun-loving addicts and glamour seekers. And over half that forty billion ends up in the bank accounts of Mexican dealers and officials they've bought off. Jorge would not be one to let such an opportunity pass by, however cautiously he might go about it. He's always got money and easy access to the best of the good life on the Mexican Caribbean coast, and Jim Suter would go for that, I have reason to believe. Jim never made much as a writer, I don't think, so Jorge's lifestyle and cir­cle of friends would be a definite draw for Jim—as it has been for so many men."