"Death Vows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stevenson Richard)

Chapter Fourteen

I checked my cell phone to see if Bill Moore had called, but he had not. I was meeting George Santiago, one of the other borrowers, at five, so I headed back toward downtown Great Barrington. I reached Ramona Furst on her cell and asked her if I could visit Fields in jail over the weekend, and she said she would set it up. We made a plan for dinner at eight at an Indian place she said was good.

As I drove up Route 7, I tried calling Lewis Bushmeyer again. The hot-tub borrower who had hung up on me the first time I called was now willing to talk, and he was still angry and upset, but this time not at me.

“Did you say you’re working for Barry Fields?” he said.

“I am.”

“And not for Steven Gaudios?”

“No. Gaudios thinks Barry shot Jim Sturdivant. Or says that’s what he thinks, anyway.”

“Are you aware that Steven called in my loan? And probably other people’s, too?”

“I heard that, yes.”

Bushmeyer said in a shaky voice, “I don’t happen to have access to four thousand dollars. And my credit is all shot to hell. I can’t go to any commercial lender.”

“That’s bad.”

“I told Steven this, and do you know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said, ‘Just. Get. The. Money.’”

“So, he was not sympathetic.”

“He said – it’s hard to believe this – but Steven said, ‘How would you like to have both your legs broken?’ Can you believe it?”

I said, “That’s not very tasteful and elegant.”

“Tasteful and elegant? He talked to me like he was some fucking gangster.”

I assured Bushmeyer that I was not a party to any of this and said, “I know of five borrowers.” I named them. “Do you know of any others?”

“No, I don’t. And I didn’t know Bill Moore borrowed money from Jim and Steven,” Bushmeyer said. “I thought Bill didn’t much like Jim and Steven. And I know Barry couldn’t stand them. He always referred to them as the toads. In fact, that name kind of caught on.”

“It’s my impression that nobody was crazy about Jim and Steven, but their charitable largesse and their generous loan terms won them a certain amount of deference and even social standing.”

“People put up with them,” Bushmeyer said. “They were part of the scenery in gay Berkshire County. But really an embarrassment to everybody.”

I said, “So, speaking of embarrassments – did you visit the hot tub in order to procure your loan, Lewis? I am not one to judge. I’m just fact-gathering.”

There was a long pause. “It was humiliating.”

“Sorry.”

“I am twenty-five years old and extremely handsome, and I am very particular about who I have sex with.”

“Good for you.”

“I have very beautiful genitals, men say.”

“That, too. Or, those.”

“And I gave myself over to those two – for money. If my credit had been better, none of this would ever have happened. I am so ashamed. And now I’m paying for my misdeed.”

“Good luck getting the money together. But four thousand is not as bad as it could have been.”

Bushmeyer said, “You don’t have any extra, do you? You sound like somebody I wouldn’t be so embarrassed to get into a hot tub with.”

“I’m not easily embarrassed, either. But I’m afraid I’m not in a position to be helpful, Lewis.”

“Then just – just fuck you!” he yelled at me and rang off.

Financial pressures can lead to both recklessness and rudeness, and my heart went out.

I phoned Timmy at his office and described my varied day: Barry Fields’ arraignment and his outburst over Myra Greene’s needless incarceration by the hard-ass DA; Joe Toomey’s warning not to mess with Thorne Cornwallis; Jean Watrous’s indignation over my description of Bill Moore as an assassin, after he had run off to Washington or elsewhere for unknown reasons; Jerry Treece’s revelation that all the loans were being called in, as well as his description of Pittsfield, the city where Sturdivant grew up and in which he was still closeted, as a “gay pit of shame”; Steven Gaudios’s distress over being shut out of the funeral and other final rites for the man to whom he had been effectively wed for forty-six years, as well as Gaudios’s goofy story about bad blood over Fields offending Jim’s mother by asking her to pipe down during Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith; and Lewis Bushmeyer’s report on (a) the beauty of his own genitalia and, arguably more importantly, (b) Gaudios’s threat to have Bushmeyer’s legs broken if he didn’t pay up.

Timmy said, “Were there just the five borrowers?”

“I still don’t know.”

“Maybe there were others, and their loans were called in earlier in the week. And one of them who couldn’t pay freaked out and decided to get rid of Sturdivant.”

“But,” I said, “the loans I know about weren’t called in until after Sturdivant was killed, and apparently as a result of his death.”

Timmy said, “Well, Donald, I’d say ‘apparently’ is the operative word there.”

“Maybe,” I said, “you should come over here and tell me what to think and what to do. And then I can wrap this up in no more than ten minutes.”

No reply. I could hear his breathing and smell his Colgate breath.

I said, “Oh, yes. Yes, I am frustrated, and yes, I am pissed off.”

“But you’re not frustrated with me, are you? Or pissed off?”

“Nuh uh.”

“Should I come over after work?”

“Yes. Come for the weekend. Bring me some clothes and my toothbrush and things, will you?”

“Okay. I’ll help if I can. But don’t snap at me if things don’t go your way. I’m not the problem here.”

“If I can’t snap at you, then who can I snap at?”

“You usually have a list.”

“One other thing, Timothy. Bring my nine-millimeter. It’s in the bedroom closet.”

“Oh. Why?”

“I think Sturdivant and Gaudios might have mob connections.”

“Now, that makes me nervous.”

“Me too. It’s nuts, but there’s this talk of leg-breaking – usually a giveaway. Gaudios told me he worked in financial services. That could mean loan-sharking, and I don’t mean the kind of loan-sharking Visa and MasterCard carry on legally with the enthusiastic endorsement of their dear friends in Congress. I mean the illegal mob kind. And Sturdivant’s family apparently has some kind of shady past in Pittsfield. I’ve got to check all that out.”

“But,” Timmy said, “loan-sharking means extortionate interest rates. Sturdivant’s rates were actually lower than market. That doesn’t sound like the Mafia to me.”

“And that’s the part of it that’s really screwy. But the other thing is, Sturdivant’s murder is looking more and more like a mob hit. So, if I’m getting into something here, I just want to be armed and alert.”

“Do you think maybe Barry Fields crossed the mob in some way, and they’ve set him up to take the murder rap?”

“Possibly.”

“But what could his involvement have been. He’s just some gay-guy, movie-nut, theater employee, isn’t he? Is it Fields’ mysterious past that might be mob-connected?”

“It could be. But a better bet is, he earned their enmity when he told an old lady to shut up, and this particular old lady was the mother of two men who weren’t used to having their mom get dissed.”