“Why would he wreck a fundraiser?” I asked.
“His own goddamn ego,” Wells said. “Everything was his own goddamn ego.”
Frouge said, “If you were that pissed off, why didn’t you just quit?”
“Maybe I don’t confide in you or anyone else around here about my job-hunting plans.”
“Are we still going to have the prom?” Tajeda asked. I figured she was attempting to change the subject and head off full-scale war. “A lot of these kids have been looking forward to it. Everything’s ordered. We got all the last-minute planning done last night. There’s nothing left to do.”
Lee said, “As long as there are no debates, no more meetings, no more anything.”
Frouge said, “As far as I can see, you would have no say in the matter. You were fired.”
Wells said, “No one’s sure who’s in charge right now. There may be no clinic. There’s enough money in the bank to pay the rent, which is due next week. I’m not sure we’ll meet payroll the week after that. Snarly’s family foundation was due to make its quarterly infusion of cash.”
Frouge said, “I wish you wouldn’t refer to him as Snarly Bitch while I’m around. He’s dead now.”
“He earned it,” Lee said.
A few of them looked abashed. It was a cruel, if well-deserved, nickname.
“Would you really go broke?” I asked.
Frouge said, “Without his money, the clinic is in deep trouble. It made up half the annual budget.”
“Which was what?” I asked.
Frouge said, “About ten million a year. The payments for five lots in this neighborhood are astronomical, much less all we had to do for upkeep on that old office building and the three houses.”
I said, “So the fundraising had to take in five million or so a year.”
“Yeah,” Wells said. “It averaged out to just under fourteen thousand dollars a day, winter or summer, rain or shine. The cash had to flow.”
Tajeda said, “I’d hope we could at least still afford some things. I’ll talk to some of the members of the board of directors about the prom. I know Charley’s sister. She’s on the board. She doesn’t take an active role in the clinic, but she might have some influence. We can’t lose sight of these kids in all this.”
Sloan Hastern said, “Maybe he had a will and left all the family’s cash to the clinic.” Hastern took a sip of coffee. Sloan was the type of guy who would take out a cigarette and a lighter and hold them in his hand and keep talking or listening while holding the things and holding them until you wanted to tell him to light the damn cigarette or stick it up his ass. Or even better, light the damn thing and stick the lit end up his ass. I’m sure he thought of it as an action that made him look more thoughtful, perhaps even gave weight to his words. It struck me as an annoying affectation. He was in his early thirties. He was in charge of the volunteers. He was tall and thin with almost no ass.
“Did he even have a will?” Tajeda asked
Lee said, “I’m not sure he had much money of his own. I think it may have been all the family’s, not his.”
“I have no idea about his personal finances,” Frouge said. “As for the clinic, the Board of Directors will have to meet. They’ll make some decisions.”
Many of them sneered at this pronouncement. The gist of their cracks about the directors was that the members of the board didn’t have a brain cell to spare between them. Even Frouge only made a half-hearted defense of the board.
Lee said, “Some of the board members were there before we left. If the situation can be made worse, they’ll find a way to do it.”
Tajeda pointed at me, “I heard they were going to talk to you about being interim head.”
Lee said, “They probably think you can raise lots of money because of your lover.”
“No offense,” Ken Wells said, “but I think there are a lot of people who have been here a lot longer and deserve to be considered before you are. It takes more than a rich lover to make someone qualified to be the head of a volunteer organization. Do you have fundraising experience?”
I chose to ignore the insult in his words and tone. I said, “I’m not trying to horn in on anybody’s territory. I don’t want the job. I am not going to apply for the job. If they offer me the job, I will turn it down. If they give me a paycheck for the job, I will not cash it. I was happy to help out in a peripheral way. I am not willing to be any further involved.” It would have been delicious to add that there wasn’t enough money minted on the planet to pay me to work with this bunch of simpering jerks on a daily basis.
Wells wasn’t ready to let it go. “The job requires some basic skills.”
Lee said, “As far as I can see the basic skills are be born rich, be rude to underlings, and be able to suck up to fat-cat donors.”
Frouge said, “He wasn’t always rude.”
Wells said, “He’d turned being rude into a way of life.” Wells organized most of the big fundraisers at the clinic. He did banquets and bike rides and bake sales—gourmet wedding cakes, not your backyard birthday brownies. Last June he had four thousand people bicycling down old Route 66 from Chicago to St. Louis in a smash-hit of a successful fundraiser. His most recent idea was to set up a bike tour along the entire route of the “mother road,” as he incessantly referred to it. He wanted to have different gay groups in cities along the way sharing in the proceeds and helping with the set-up and contributing volunteers. If anyone did, he had the energy to make a two-thousand-mile money maker happen. He could get items for gay auctions that other people marveled at. Of course, how could you prove it was Greg Maddox’s jock strap you were bidding on?
Tajeda said, “I’ve never been involved with a death in this way before. It’s awful. I can’t imagine trying to work anymore at a place where this kind of thing has happened. What are people going to think? Even if we had nothing to do with it, and I’m sure no one here did, people are going to look at us funny. They’ll think we were involved at least until they find out who did it. And we’ll always have a taint about us. If we put the clinic down on a résumé as a place of employment, they’ll all know we were connected in some way to murder.”
Lee said, “The police have lots of suspects. Anybody who ever worked at the clinic is going to be on the list. I hope it doesn’t spread to any of the kids. They’ve got enough hassles.”
Frouge said, “They shouldn’t be looking at people who worked in the clinic. Charley was our meal ticket. We had no reason to kill him.”
“He wasn’t my meal ticket anymore,” Lee said.
“And killing him wouldn’t make him your meal ticket again,” Tajeda said.
Jakalyn Bowman said, “This is a public relations disaster. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve gotten calls from all the media. They want statements. The board members don’t have a clue about what to say or do. It’s just chaos. I wish someone at the clinic had at least a little experience with the press besides myself.”
Bowman was a woman in her fifties with a figure that resembled Queen Victoria after her prime. She abused underlings almost as often as Charley Fitch did. Most of the time she put on a huge smiling show for the mainstream press and sucked up to them like a vacuum cleaner gone berserk. She was pretty rude to the gay press in general. She thought it was beneath her dignity to deal with them.
“We’ve all talked to reporters,” Lee said.
Bowman stated, “None of you has the experience I’ve had. The whole clinic would be better off if people would direct reporters to me. So many of the people who work here think they know how to deal with the media, and they don’t. They aren’t professionals. I am. I know what to say. All of you and the board should let me talk to the press. I can try and make this not as awful as it seems.”
“It is as awful as it seems,” Lee said. “How can you possibly minimize it?”
“A good press person can always help a situation.”
I wondered if a jury would convict someone who mach
ine-gunned all these people. All the accused would need on the jury is one other person who had ever worked for a gay organization—that jury would never convict him, probably give the killer a medal.
Frouge said, “The police should look at all the right-wing homocons in town. They all hate each other. There’s violence there waiting to happen.”
Heads nodded sagely. The latest feud in the gay community to get media play was right-wing versus left-wing. Since at least the Sixties, the majority of gay people have been at least vaguely in favor of the left and certainly vote heavily Democratic. The right has been the enemy. Recently, a small minority of gay people had decided that “economics is our friend.” Unfortunately, the people who support the economic policies gay right-wingers claim will set us free happen to be homophobic, right-wing, Bible-thumping morons.
Each side in the gay left/right feud seem to be in a contest to see who can be more supercilious than the other. Snarly was good at supercilious and managed to add snide and rude. He had well honed the talk-show virtues of rudeness, interrupting, and talking over the opponent. He was a staple on a local right-wing cable television show. The host, Benton Fredericks, a washed-up PBS host (almost an oxymoron), kept Snarly around as a patsy for right-wing attack dogs. To be fair, Fredericks abused both sides evenly, though his bias was decidedly in favor of stupidity. I’d seen Snarly on the show once. I thought he’d come across as an inarticulate boob, perhaps an appellation that could be appended to anyone who appeared on a right-wing show.
Lee said, “That crowd feeds on outrage.”
“Did he meet them outside of a television or radio studio?” Tajeda asked.
Frouge said, “This isn’t that big a town. You’ve seen some of the blind gossip items in the local bar rags. Like that crap in the ‘Blithering Bullshit’ column in that scandal sheet Party On. ‘Which two battling activists were in the back room of the Black Pit bar pissing on each other, and we don’t mean with their zippers closed.’ Charley would talk about trying to sue those publications. The attacks they made were sneaky, underhanded, and unprincipled.”
Lee said, “You would have preferred them to be openly unprincipled?”
I didn’t admit that I knew the reporter who wrote the column in question. Actually, he was Scott’s acquaintance. Scott has always been good with the press, even vermin from the gutter papers. I don’t know how he’s so patient. I thought it might be a good idea to get this reporter’s perspective on all this.
Frouge said, “You people just never understood Charley. Who reads that crap in the bar rags? Who gives a rat’s ass? Anybody here ever hear the song ‘I Don’t Care’?” Head shakes. “It’s wonderful. The singers go through a mound of modern gossip moments followed by the singers and audiences chanting ‘I don’t care.’ One of the great moments in radio history.”
“But people do care,” Tajeda said. “I heard the stories about the fights between Charley and the others were true, but except for the chair incident, I’ve got no proof. I heard about him throwing drinks at right-wing enemies at cocktail parties, but I never actually met someone who saw him do it.”
Wells said, “I doubt if there were any fists thrown. Normally, they wouldn’t even be at the same fundraisers. The two sides probably wouldn’t have appealed to the same donors.”
Tajeda said, “There was violence, that once.”
“It never came to anything, though,” Lee said.
The last time Charley had been on Benton Fredricks’ News Forum cable show had been a classic. One of Charley Fitch’s archenemies in the gay community was Billy Karek. They had been asked to do a panel discussion together. The topic was supposed to be the public image of homosexuals in society. Fitch and Karek started off angry. Snarly accused Karek of being a “homocon,” the name some in the media used to describe gay conservatives.
Karek gave a commentary every week on a gay radio program that ran sometime in the middle of the night on a station whose signal barely reached from Belmont Avenue to Fullerton Avenue and from Halsted to the lake. Karek had used the forum to attack Fitch. Before the cable program fiasco, like most people, I’d never heard of News Forum. I doubted if ten people listened to it. But Charley Fitch had gotten hold of transcripts of the radio show attacks. Karek had concentrated on how he saw Fitch as an illogical leftist, with ideas that had been barely sustainable in the Sixties. Karek had all but called Fitch a communist. The diatribe that set Charley off was when Karek said, “Have we changed from defenders of the downtrodden to defenders of all the drag queens and transvestites on the planet? Whatever happened to normal people?” On the cable show, Karek had taken off on him again. They’d moved from sparring to shouting. Benton Fredericks made no move to stop them. He knew a ratings booster when he saw one. The way I heard it, both had been waving their arms, pointing fingers, and pounding on the table. Then Fitch had reached over and grabbed Karek by the tie and tried to slam his face into the table between them. Karek had managed to free himself, but the brawl was on. The highlights that played on all the television stations were Karek swinging a folding chair at Charley Fitch’s head, and Charley picking up a microphone and trying to bash in Karek’s brains with it. They’d both missed. Too bad. Karek wound up cowering under the broadcaster’s console. The incident had made national news. The clip had been repeated on local television stations ad nauseam. The enmity between the two men had gone from pre-fight fierce, to post-fight total war.
I suspected mostly these people were fighting turf wars over a very small piece of turf. Huge egos with no place else to go. And it wasn’t just the politically correct trying to lead the politically incorrect. More than once I’d seen right-and left-wing gay people on any number of talk shows doing everything but the physical confrontation that Karek and Charley Fitch had done. I’d pretty much sworn off reading articles in which they vilified each other, and the remote control was always within reach when they got themselves on television. Scott was a bit of a problem about this. He claimed he liked watching these people. Guerrilla theater? The equivalent of watching a train wreck? Morbid curiosity? I never could figure that out.
The quarrels among the people at the clinic were very real and very human, filled with very old-fashioned human enmities. I had talked with many of them one on one. At rest and with someone not perceived as a threat, they seemed okay. I thought these were essentially good people, but the situation was out of control.
Frouge said, “They never saw each other after that fight. Charley never mentioned Karek’s name.”
“Were there other of these homocons that he had fights with?”
“All of them,” Ken Wells said.
“Specifically.”
Tajeda said, “Albert Bergland was a crazed right-winger. He has a web site dedicated to his own opinions. He would vilify anybody who didn’t agree with him. You know, one of those blog things. It’s kind of a shame that those people with pointless, witless, and brainless opinions now have an outlet.”
“I know I feel better that they do,” Lee said. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.”
“Hence the Internet,” Ken Wells said.
“Anybody else?” I asked.
Bowman said, “There was Mandy Marlex. She’s the lesbian of the moment. You see her on all kinds of ratings-starved cable shows. She doesn’t have much television presence, but she manages to say just the correct stupid thing so the host can rant against her.”
“Did Charley have any friends?” I asked.
Bowman said, “You’ve got to understand, the clinic was Charley’s life. It’s all he thought about. He was obsessed with raising money to keep it going. The family money was never enough. He didn’t really have much of a life. He may have been an asshole, as you guys say, but he really was dedicated to making the clinic work.”
I said, “He must have had friends.”
Hastern said, “And a few lovers over the years.”
Wells said, “At least he said they were love
rs. I always thought the men he brought around looked like Snarly picked them up from Pool Boys ‘R’ Us and paid for them. To be fair, Snarly could be a charmer. He could work a crowd at a fundraiser like nobody I’ve ever seen. He was never rude to big money, never.”
Lee said to Frouge, “Do you know if they were call boys?”
Frouge said, “I have no idea. I would never have presumed to ask. The man is dead, for god’s sake.”
“I’m not going to turn into a hypocrite because he’s dead,” Lee said.
Tajeda said, “Snarly was the hypocrite. How much effort does it really take to be pleasant to your staff? Takes just as much effort to be pleasant as unpleasant.”
“He was a friend,” Frouge said. “Friends have flaws. We all do. I won’t deny that were times I wished he’d said something different, but he was a good man. Maybe we could change the subject.”
We called over a waiter and ordered more cups of coffee and muffins, which were the best in the city. Several people took trips to the unisex washrooms. I leaned back and shut my eyes. I got a flash of the file drawer, blood and gore covering a human head. I opened my eyes. I guess there were worse things than listening to these people.
When everybody had a fresh supply of caffeine and sugar, Lee asked Hastern and Bowman, “Did Jan tell either of you what he said to the police?”
“He was still in there with them when we came over,” Hastern said.
Ken Wells snorted. “Who gives a shit about that self-obsessed teen drag queen? I saw him flitting about the clinic all morning. I think one of the detectives was ready to use a pair of handcuffs to attach him by the neck to the highest branch in the nearest tall tree. That kid has got some kind of radar for trying to put himself in the middle of anything. The bigger the thing is, the more he wants to be in the middle of it. I hate that effeminate bullshit. Who teaches them that crap?”
Tajeda said, “Jan’s all right. He just has an overactive imagination.”
Wells gave her a sour look.
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