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

Chapter Twenty-five

I drove back to the motel and told Timmy about my meeting with Gaudios.

He said, “So if Steven is lying and he’s in touch with the mob guys, won’t he alert them that you’re still working on the case and you haven’t been frightened off?”

“This is possible.”

“All the more reason to wrap this one up fast.”

“Yes, I would say so.”

I told Timmy I was having lunch with slippery Bill Moore, and he said in that case he would accept Preston Morley’s invitation for a hike up Monument Mountain and a picnic there with Morley and David Murano. Timmy said this was the spot where Hawthorne and Melville once picnicked together and set off intellectual sparks that may have set the course of American literature for the next fifty years.

I said, “I’m sorry I can’t come too, but I’ve got a more immediate and up-to-the-minute bundle of sparks to set off.”

“I wouldn’t dismiss the relevance of Hawthorne and Melville to this case,” Timmy said. “Hawthorne was haunted by his family’s past in Salem, and Melville by what he had seen and done as a young man at sea. The Sturdivant murder seems to have a lot to do with the past catching up with people who thought they had outrun it.”

“Or who thought they could both escape the past and exploit it at the same time.”

We sat there, the Sunday papers spread out around us on the motel bed with the bedspread you didn’t want to get too close to. Did we know what we were talking about? As it happened, yes and no.

Moore’s Honda was parked in his driveway. I pulled in behind it and went up the front steps of his pleasant house on its pleasant hillside. Despite the strain he was under, Moore looked fresh and fit in clean jeans and a navy blue T-shirt. I followed him into the living room with the giant TV and the movie memorabilia. He offered me a beer, and when I declined, he said, “I guess I better stay sober myself. I’m seeing Barry at three, and he won’t appreciate it if I’m fucked up.”

“How is Barry doing? What have you heard?” I seated myself on one of the leather chairs. There was no sign of pizza – a relief – just some bar nuts in a dish.

“He’s okay, Ramona says, and they’ve got some good shrinks keeping an eye on him. But Barry really needs to get away from here as soon as he can. He is not a violent person, but I’m really afraid of what he’ll do if his family actually shows up here. What a fucking nightmare.”

“I know who they are,” I said.

“Yeah, Ramona told me you figured it out.”

“I understand why he doesn’t want to have anything to do with them, and why he would not want it known that he was a relative. What’s the relationship? Is Barry Reverend Felson’s grandson?”

Moore nodded. “Barry’s mom, Edna, is Fred’s third daughter. His dad is Warren Krider, one of Fred’s loony flock.

Barry’s real name is Benjamin Krider. Warren and Edna tossed him out on the street when he was seventeen after they caught him in bed with a kid in his Bible study class. They didn’t even try to have him de-programmed or exorcised. The nutty de-gaying approach is for the relatively more enlightened Evangelicals. The Kriders just told Barry he was an agent of Satan and to get the hell out.”

“That he is bright and decent didn’t figure in, it looks like.”

“No, bright and decent are not what Christianity is about with the Felsons. Dumb and hateful is the rule. How Barry survived his own family with nothing worse than a lot of anger is a mystery. He can’t explain it himself. He thinks he may have learned how to be human from a couple of teachers he had in school, and from old movies he rented and watched when Edna and Warren were out protesting against homosexuals. Some parents have to worry that their kids are home watching porn, but Barry once told me he was led astray from his family by watching M-G-M musicals, Frank Capra and Truffaut.”

“The Reformed Church of Arthur Freed. I’d have signed up for that. So Barry left Topeka when he was seventeen?”

“He hitched a ride to Denver, the gay mecca of the mountains and plains. He knew about Denver because the Felsons had picketed AIDS-victim funerals there, and Barry had gone along a few times and seen all the counter-protesters. So he knew right where to go. He shacked up with a guy he met in a park for a while, and then he met Bud Radziwill at a gay community center. Bud’s family hadn’t thrown him out, but they were so homophobic that he ran away on his own.”

I said, “Bud Radziwill is really Bud Huffler, right?”

Moore looked startled. “How did you know?”

“He’s from Oklahoma, I’ve been informed by an expert amateur linguist. I knew his story was similar to Barry’s because Bud told me his family were homophobic horrors, too. The most infamous public homophobe in Oklahoma is Republican Senator Elwin Huffler. He’s the man who, during a debate on the anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment, stood on the Senate floor and bragged that no one in his family had ever been divorced or had ever been a homosexual.”

Moore said, “Yeah, that’s Bud’s granddad. A piece of work.”

“Isn’t Bud ever tempted to make a liar out of that awful clown?”

“I don’t think so,” Moore said. “Bud just wants a life. Like the rest of us.”

“So he and Barry met in Denver and became pals?”

“They were boyfriends for a week or so, but the chemistry just wasn’t there for that and they decided to be friends instead. They got restaurant jobs, and when they got worried about Bud being tracked down by his family, both of them decided to change their identities and make a complete break from their old lives. Some of the illegal Mexicans they met in the restaurant where they worked showed them how to get fake IDs.”

I said, “It’s ironic that Congress – including Senator Huffler – is beside itself over all the aliens with phony papers, when remaking oneself has always been the quintessentially American act. It almost ought to be a requirement of citizenship.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Oh, sorry, Bill. You must have to take the FBI’s line on illegal immigration, you being a former agent and all.”

Moore did not take this opportunity to enlighten me on his Washington career, and I let it go for the moment.

Moore smiled weakly and said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to turn them in.”

“You’re a regular fellow.”

“Barry and Bud were very fortunate in Denver,” Moore went on. “Somebody in the gay movement there put them in touch with the Hemmings Foundation, which arranges for college scholarships for smart, gay kids who are alienated from their families. So they both went to the University of Colorado, where they really thrived. Bud calls Boulder the Emerald City.”

“It must have seemed magical after… where? Oklahoma City? Tulsa?”

“Enid. Not so cosmopolitan as Tulsa.”

“And after college they came to the Berkshires?”

“They met some people in Boulder who’d gone to Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, and this area sounded to them like a place that was both civilized for gay people and a long way from their families. So they just drove their old truck here after graduation, and you know the rest.”

“That’s an amazing tale, Bill. I admire those two brave guys immensely, and I’m going to do everything I can, within my meager powers, to make sure their good life in the Berkshires can continue. But first I’d like to hear the story of how and why you moved up here.”

Moore scowled and shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I hired you, Strachey, so that I would not have to demonstrate skills and knowledge I gained at the bureau, and so local people would not start looking at me in a certain way. I want my privacy, and I want my identity as a computer technician, and that’s not asking a lot. And I’m not sorry I hired you to be me. You’re good at it. A hell of a lot better than I was.” He looked at me grimly.

I said, “You got drunk one night at Twenty Railroad and told a fellow drinker you had killed people during your career, and you were tortured by the memory of this.”

His mouth opened and he looked around the room, as if to check if anyone else might be overhearing our conversation. Then he stared at me hard. After a long, tense moment, Moore said, “My real name is Willis Garwinski.”

“That doesn’t ring a bell for me. Should it?”

“Two people in Great Barrington know the truth about me – Barry and Jean Watrous. Jean and I were colleagues at the bureau.”

“Oh, so you worked in counterterrorism. I know Jean did.”

“You just know fucking everything about everybody, don’t you, Strachey? Well, you’ll be the third person up here to know about me, and you have to keep your goddamn mouth shut. Do you understand me? Can I trust you?” His face was flushed, and now he looked not so much frightened and angry as imploring.

I said, “I won’t be aiding a felon, will I? I don’t want Thorny throwing me in the lockup like Myra Greene.”

Moore looked at me and said, “I am not a felon. I was never tried and convicted. Nobody was.”

“Tried and convicted for what? We’re you some kind of assassin?”

“Yeah,” Moore said and clasped his hands together tightly as he seemed to shrink into his chair. “I was an assassin, all right. I killed three thousand people.”

It was the number. My breath caught. I knew immediately what he meant. We sat looking at each other.

I said, “It was the system, the cultures, the bad leadership. You were not responsible.”

He shook his head.

I said, “The FBI was there to prosecute crimes, and the CIA was there to gather intelligence, and the dolts in charge never cracked heads and demanded that the cultures merge and transform themselves to accommodate the new reality of international terrorism. No single person let nine-eleven happen, except maybe Clinton or Bush.”

Moore said evenly, “No, mistakes were made by individual people, and I was one of them. It could have been prevented. It should have been prevented. There were people in the bureau screaming for clues to be taken seriously. There was the supervisor in Phoenix who asked headquarters to check out Arabs with suspicious backgrounds matriculating at US flight schools. There was the Minneapolis agent who reported Zacarias Moussaoui’s weird interest in flying but not landing airliners, and then Washington declining a request to go into Moussaoui’s laptop because there was no probable cause. Then there were the CIA dickheads who knew that al-Qaeda operatives involved in the bombing of the USS Cole were inside the US and refused to modify their procedures and hand over the names of these characters to some of our guys who were actually hot on the trail of something big – something big which they didn’t know what it was until the day it happened.”

I said, “I’ve read about some of this. Some FBI people were suspicious, and they were thwarted.”

Moore said, “Well, take a good look at the man you’re sitting in this room with. I was one of the thwarters.”

“Jesus, Bill.”

“Checking out every Arab in a US flight school would have tied up hundreds of agents for months, or years.”

“And you didn’t have the resources?”

“Counterterrorism was way understaffed and underfunded. And the way up in the bureau was always to put crooks in jail – crooks who had already committed crimes. That’s what the bureau had always been for. Though basically the problem for me was, I was one of the people who thought, it can’t happen here. God will protect the United States of America.”

“Bill,” I said, “or Willis. You’re being way too hard on yourself. I’ll bet other people have said, yeah, we were wrong, but now let’s move ahead and get it right. That’s the important thing, getting it right the next time.”

“The other thing is, Strachey, I actually thought about taking some of this shit that was coming in more seriously and pushing harder. But I didn’t do that, because in my career at the bureau I was never a boat rocker. I was always Mister Go-along, Get-along. I didn’t dare be a troublemaker. I couldn’t afford to draw too much attention to myself. And I think you know why.”

“Oh. That again.”

“It’s ironic,” Moore said, “in an organization whose headquarters is named for that candy-ass closet case J. Edgar Hoover. But the FBI is not an institution where out gay people can expect to move up. Or expect to be taken seriously at all.”

I said, “But you must have been taken seriously enough – even though you’re out of the closet now – that you thought you could go down to DC on Friday and knowledgeable people there would be helpful with the Sturdivant murder investigation. Am I right?”

“Yeah, there are people who still talk to me, in the bureau and at Justice. And they did help me out. I can confirm to you that Michael Sturdivant is involved in sports betting and numbers in Providence. And while he’s never been convicted, Michael has probably badly injured a number of citizens in the course of his business activities. Michael is a baddie, for sure.”

“This is helpful. It confirms what I picked up in Pittsfield.”

“Our problem,” Moore said, “is that there’s nada on Jim Sturdivant and Steven Gaudios. I was pretty sure they were into something dirty, and that’s why Jim got whacked.”

“I thought so, too.”

“It turns out, however, that they are model citizens. They got rich the way most people get rich in the US of A – legally investing in the honest labor of others.”

“Which leaves us,” I said, “with no plausible motive for Jim being killed by the mob. Except, the evidence is piling up that that is exactly what happened.” I described to Moore my meeting with Thorne Cornwallis, my conversations with two Pittsfield hometown thugs, the apparent involvement with Michael Sturdivant of a Schenectady hit man, and the firebombing of my office and the attack on my car to warn me off the Sturdivant murder case.

Moore said, “Then they sure as hell did it. Those fuckers killed Jim. Christ, but why?”

“Maybe it was personal? Except, why would either of them have anything to do with these mob guys? Michael and Jim were brothers, and both of them seemed devoted to their mother, the sainted Anne Marie. But that seems to be their only current point of connection.”

“Maybe,” Moore said, “Jim did something to hurt Anne Marie and it set Michael off.”

“Like what? Jim basically indulged her every wish and need, I’ve been told by Pittsfield people, including staying basically closeted north of Stockbridge so she would not have to face the ignominy of having begotten a fag son. And he left her a million-five. How could he possibly have offended her at this late date?”

Moore said, “What’s a woman in her mid-eighties or older going to do with a million and a half dollars? That’s a lot of bingo cards.”

I pondered this. “So who is in her will? Is that what you’re saying? Like maybe Michael is her heir, and she’s in ill health, and if she died before Jim, the one-point-five would go to someone else, like Gaudios or the opera? But the way it works now, the money goes to Anne Marie and then, when she croaks, to Michael?”

“Maybe. Mob guys think that way. Even when family members are involved. Maybe especially when family members are involved.”

“So,” I said, “what we have to find out is, how healthy is Anne Marie, and who is in her will?”

Moore thought about this and said, “What else have we got?”

I thought about it too, and it just didn’t feel like the answer. It was too tidy, too small, too shabby. Not that people’s lives weren’t sometimes snuffed out by smallness and shabbiness. The horror of that ugly truth – that the Clutter family could be massacred by a couple of dim punks, that JFK could be deleted from the American landscape by a bitter and confused creep who got off a series of lucky shots – was why so many people chose instead to believe in fate, or divine retribution, or vast conspiracies that don’t exist. That people’s lives could be ended for dumb, trivial reasons was just too awful for some people to contemplate, even though it was all too grotesquely true.

And yet, I still felt this wasn’t about money. Jim Sturdivant’s life had been too complex, too fraught, and his killing too seemingly out of the blue.

I said, “Bill, I’m sorry I called you an assassin. I wish you had told me the truth. I’d have been understanding, as most people would be.”

He shrugged weakly. “I just don’t want to be the man that people look at and say ’that’s the man who… you-knowwhat.’ I don’t want to be that guy to anybody except myself. Which is hard enough, believe me.”

“I understand now why both you and Barry first bonded over your carrying secrets that haunted both of you. But Barry’s secret might soon be revealed, and I can’t help suspecting that he’ll be stronger and healthier for it. He won’t be carrying the load nearly all alone. And maybe that could also be the case for you.”

“Barry has been my savior, that’s for sure,” Moore said, his voice unsteady now. “He’s been the one person who’s been able to drag me kicking and screaming out of myself. And I didn’t move to Massachusetts for its gay politics. I came here because Jean has been a real pal to me. But now that I am free and out of the closet, I just feel so goddamned lucky I live in a state where two men who love each other and are devoted to each other can stand up in front of their families and friends and the whole fucking town and proclaim their love and commitment, and then get recognition from the state for doing it.”

“It’s a truly wonderful thing,” I said.

“I feel bad for people in other states who can’t do it,” Moore went on, “and also for people right here in Massachusetts who for religious or family reasons can’t just go down to town hall and get hitched, even though they know in their hearts that their relationships are as deep and good and true as anybody else’s.”

I thought of Preston and David and how fortunate they were – maybe Timmy and I would have the chance to do this one day also – and I remembered at lunch on Saturday noticing Preston and David’s twin silver wedding bands. Then I remembered someone else I had just been with who was wearing a silver band on his ring finger, and that’s when it all came together.