Death trick ds-1

by Richard Stevenson

  “Sometimes there were people he knew, but Billy never introduced any of them. It would have been nice if he had. After all, everybody’s welcome here. You know, come to think of it, the one time I saw Billy get really upset, I mean lose control and just go bananas, wasn’t with me at all. It was when a guy came in Billy thought he knew, but it turned out to be somebody else. This guy was just going out the door when Billy came out of the back room and saw him and started yelling Eddie! Eddie! and running after the guy. The kid turned around and looked at Billy like he was some kind of weirdo, and when Billy saw it wasn’t who he thought it was, he came tearing back here and started cursing and throwing stuff around like he was a little bit nuts. Then he sat down and started shaking like a leaf and said he was sick, so I sent him on home. Billy scared the bejesus out of me that day. I’d never seen him act like that before.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Maybe six, eight months ago.”

  “Billy thought it was someone named Eddie? That was the name he called?”

  “Yeah, but when I asked him who Eddie was, he said it was none of my effing business. Except he said the word. You know the one.”

  “Right. But you don’t recall any other names of Billy’s friends, other than Huey?”

  “No, they’d come in sometimes, but I never knew their names. They’d buy the disco stuff. That’s what the younger ones go for, you know. I mean the, uh, middle-aged ones, too. I mean-some of them.” Elvin John shifted on his stool and took on a confused look.

  “What do the elderly ones go for?” I said. “I’ll make a note of it for future reference.”

  His round face tightened. “It sounds to me like you’re pulling my leg. In a mean kind of way. You gays are real cynical, aren’t you? I’ve heard that.”

  “With role models like Oscar Wilde, what can you expect? If only Eleanor Roosevelt had come out.” I handed him my business card. “If Billy gets in touch, do him a favor and contact me before you call the cops. They’ve been in, right?” He nodded. “Just give me a day’s head start and then do what you think you have to.”

  “Well, um-I’ll have to think about that. I don’t want to get in any trouble. You know?”

  “I know.”

  He inserted the card in a plastic sleeve in his wallet. “Say, where do you think Billy might be hiding?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “I suppose he might be with some other homosexuals, wouldn’t you say? They tend to stick together.”

  “Many do.”

  “Maybe Billy went to San Francisco.”

  “Could be. To seek sanctuary with the Mother Church.”

  Elvin John burst into laughter. “Oh, that’s rich! The Mother Church! Like it was the Catholic religion, ha! ha! That really cracks me up! Is that what they call fag humor?”

  “Yup.”

  I had a bowl of chowder and a grilled cheese at Friendly’s, made a note to check out Huey and Eddie, then called Timmy from the pay phone. He’d just gotten in and said he had a frozen pizza in the oven, and why didn’t I come over?

  I said, “The homosexual gourmet at work. A sizable discretionary income, the leisure time to refine one’s tastes and skills-it’s a good life.”

  “Right, and I suppose you’re calling from Elmo’s-no, it’s the dinner hour-Wendy’s.”

  “Friendly’s.”

  “You going out?”

  “Around nine. Should I pick you up?”

  “Yes, and I want to dance. I’m keyed up. I spent the afternoon with a roomful of Democratic county chairmen.”

  “How about Trucky’s? You won’t run into too many county chairmen out there. Only two that I know of. Anyway, I have to go there.”

  “Sure. You have to?”

  “Business. The Blounts called. I’m on the case. To find their son.”

  “I knew it. I’m involved with a man with a reputation.”

  “They did mention that I had credentials the Pinkerton Agency couldn’t necessarily come up with.”

  “But I thought you knew a couple of Pinkerton guys who-”

  “Closet cases. Think of the business Pinkerton must be losing.”

  “Two, three cases a decade at least. Do you have any idea where the Blounts’ son is?”

  “No.”

  “He did it, though, right?”

  “The police think so. I haven’t formed an opinion. The only thing I know for sure is that it’d be hard growing up in the Blount household without thoughts of homicide at least passing through your mind.”

  I drove back into the city through the Friday evening commuter traffic. Billy Blount’s apartment was on the third floor of a white brick Dutch colonial building on Madison near New Scotland. It was almost directly across the park from his parents’ house.

  The front door to the building was locked. I stood in the cold and peered through the heavy glass at the mailboxes in the entryway. One said “H. Pickering.” A middle-aged man in a topcoat and knit cap came up the steps and inserted a key in the door. I followed him in and said, “Excuse me, isn’t this Helen Pickering’s place?”

  Two bushy eyebrows went up. “Harry Pickering. I’m Harry Pickering. No other Pickerings live here. What do you want?”

  I said, “I’m collecting for the Steve Rubell Defense Fund. Would you care to donate?”

  A look of alarm. “You’d better leave, mister.”

  He shoved the door shut behind me and went up the stairs, glancing back once menacingly. I went and stood at the curb. Ten minutes later a woman in a trench coat and a pretty Indian silk scarf trudged up the stone steps with a bag of groceries. I tagged along.

  “This Harry Pickering’s place?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  “You should get to know him. One of the sweetest guys you’ll ever meet.”

  She smiled and entered a first-floor apartment, and I walked to the third. Blount’s name was printed on a card on the door of 3-A. I went through the lock with a lobster pick that had been a wedding gift from Brigit’s cousins Brad and Bootsy, and went in.

  The living room, which looked out on Madison and the park, had off-white walls that were bare except for a big poster of the 1969 gay-pride march that had a lot of raised fists and looked like an ad for Levi Strauss. There was a daybed with a faded floral print coverlet and a couple of scruffy easy chairs. A bent coat hanger had replaced the antenna on a battered old black-and-white TV set. The newer, more expensive stereo amplifier and turntable sat on a board resting on cinder blocks, the speakers on either end. The two hundred or so records lined up on the floor between more cinder blocks were mostly disco, with some baroque ensemble stuff-Corelli, Telemann, Bach. No Judy Garland. The post-Stonewall generation.

  The fake walnut bookshelves contained a row of old poli-sci textbooks, some fiction paperbacks

  ��� Catch-22; Man’s Fate; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, other good modern stuff-and a collection of current gay literature: Katz’s Gay American History; Out of the Closets and into the Streets; Loving Someone Gay; others. There was a nongay fifteen-year-old assortment of radical opinion: Cleaver, Jackson, Sol Alinsky, various antiwar writers, and a dusty hardback copy of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth with a bookmark stuck a third of the way into it. He’d tried.

  He also probably had some politically aware friends who’d come of age in the sixties, making them close to my age.

  The small kitchen was clean and appeared to have been little used. The old Frigidaire contained only an egg carton with two eggs, a bottle of Price Chopper ketchup, a pint of plain yogurt, three bottles of Valu Pack beer, and a plastic bag with enough grass left in it for maybe one joint.

  Another gay gourmand for Edmund White to visit

  The bedroom, in the rear, was furnished with a mattress on a box spring; the bed was unmade.

  On the floor beside the bed lay a copy of the August 27 Advocate, a half-full popper, a telephone, and a phone book. Four first names and numbers had been handw
ritten on the back cover of the phone book. I copied them down: Huey, Chris, Frank, Mark. Huey again. But no Eddie.

  A single bureau was cluttered on top with coins, ball-point pens, old copies of the capital-district gay guide. No personal papers of any kind, not even an unpaid bill. Albany’s finest had been there.

  The dresser had three drawers. The top one was filled with summer clothing: tank tops, Tshirts, shorts, jeans. The bottom drawers were nearly empty, except for one ratty crew-neck sweater with a dirty collar and a pair of new corduroys with the price tag still stapled on-wrong size, lost the receipt.

  The bathroom, a high-ceilinged pit with a dim light bulb about a mile up, had two racks clotted with dirty bath towels and appeared to be missing three items: toothbrush, toothpaste, razor.

  When Billy Blount disappeared, he’d had his wits about him and probably knew where he was heading: to a wintery place where the population observed habits of oral hygiene and good grooming. This meant that I would not be searching for Billy Blount among the Ik people, which was a start

  I switched off all the lights and was about to depart when Billy’s phone rang. I picked up the receiver and said, “Blount residence.” No one spoke. I was aware, though, of a presence at the other end of the line. I said, “I’m Donald Strachey and I’m trying to locate Billy Blount for his parents, who want to help him. Who’s this?” No response. Then, after a time, there came a sort of choked sound, and the line went dead.

  3

  I drove over to my place on Morton. I could see my breath in the air in the front room, went to the kitchenette, set the oven at 450, and opened the door. Ten days. Hurlbut the landlord would make steam October fifteenth, the day he left annually for Fort Lauderdale. Then I could grow orchids on the windowsill and fungus on my shoes until the old man reappeared to shut off his rain forest machine on March fifteenth, the first day of Hurlbut’s summer.

  I set the phone on the kitchen table, propped my feet on the oven door, and phoned three people I knew who’d been involved in the early days of the gay movement in Albany. Each expressed roughly the same opinion about Billy Blount: that he was a decent, likable young man, if slightly pushy and opinionated, who had dropped out of the movement several years earlier because he found the local organizations insufficiently radical in their outlook and tactics. Each man I talked to was skeptical of the official view that Blount had killed a man, but none had any idea where Blount had gone or even who his current friends were. I’d have to find out the hard way.

  I flipped on the TV for the six o’clock news. Dick Block, action man for the anchor news team, was squinting into the camera trying to puzzle out the names and places of the day’s calamities. Fresh news on the Kleckner murder was not among them. I stripped to my briefs and did sit-ups while Snort Harrigan grappled disgustedly with the sports report.

  I remembered the envelope the Blounts had given me for their son. I dug it out of my jacket lining and slid it into the jacket of Thelma Houston’s “I’m Here Again.”

  I went into the bathroom, showered, and shaved. I spotted a single white hair in my mustache, probed around and got a grip on it, and yanked it out. I checked my armpits, chest, and groin. No change below the neck yet. That was when you’d know it was for real.

  I went to the daybed, set the alarm for eight-thirty, pulled the old Hudson Bay blanket over me, and slept.

  “Tell me about the Blounts,” Timmy said. “I get the impression they aren’t exactly Albert and Victoria.”

  We were heading down Delaware toward Lark in the Rabbit. Timmy was beside me in a Woolrich shirt over a dark blue turtleneck and faded jeans the color of his eyes. I had Disco 101 on the radio-Friday-night pump priming-and they were playing Stargard’s “Wear It Out.”

  “They’re more like the duke and duchess of Windsor,” I said, “by way of Dartmouth, Sweetbriai, and the Fort Orange Club. I think they might have a few vital parts missing. They talk as if their kid might come out of all this with the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  “Kissinger got one.”

  “Yeah, but the Albany County DA’s office wasn’t consulted.”

  “I heard they were. It was part of a deal worked out with the mayor, the Swedish Academy, and a vending company in McKownville.”

  “Ahhh.”

  We swung onto Lark.

  “Even so, they must be upset with all the publicity. People with old Albany names like Blount prefer their names on downtown street signs, not in the newspapers. The social pages are okay, and then eventually a seemly obituary. But the front page is bad taste, pushy. It’s for the Irish and the Jews.”

  “This is true. The missus especially is not pleased with the gay angle getting bruited about. She thinks that part of it’s all a horrid misunderstanding, anyway. She says her boy has ‘tendencies.’”

  “A phase he’s going through.”

  “The craziest thing is they seem to be looking at all this as some kind of opportunity-make the best of it, the missus said. They’ve got a weird relationship with their son. There’s a lot of tension and bad feeling over the way he lives, yet he seems to keep coming back to them when he needs them or when he wants to embarrass them. They sound like they expect this recent messiness to lead to a big, wonderful final reconciliation. Or something.”

  “It’ll be interesting to get Billy Blount’s slant on the relationship.”

  “It will.”

  I turned up Central and found a parking place a few doors past the Terminal Bar. We went in.

  On weekends the Terminal was misnamed. It was a relatively quiet neighborhood drink-and-talk pub where on weeknights people often dropped in for an hour or two. But on Friday and Saturday nights the bar was where a good number of gay men started out for the evening before ending up at the big shake-your-ass-bust-an-eardrum discos on up Central. Those who hung around the Terminal until four A.M. closing were mostly the “serious drinkers,” many of them alcoholics, who sometimes, in moments of clarity, referred to the bar as the Terminal Illness.

  We bought fifty-cent draughts and moved through the murk beyond the pool table and the bar to the back of the room, where we knew we’d find friends. One of the five tables was empty-it was just after nine, early yet. Another table was occupied by three theological activists in the gay Happy Days Church, gazing mournfully into their beer, pitched, as they always seemed to be, in medieval gloom. Happy days, glum nights, I guessed. Some fresh-faced SUNY students sat at another table in the company of an older admirer. Timmy and I spotted a couple of the Gay Community Center crowd and went over to their table as the Rae’s “A Little Lovin’” came on.

  “Where’ve you guys been hiding yourselves? Haven’t seen you since-last night.” Phil Jerrold, a lanky blond with a crooked smile and what Timmy once described as “a winning squint,” shoved his chair aside so we could squeeze in around the little table.

  “Is it tonight?” Timmy said. “I thought it was still last night. When I’m in here, I get mixed up.

  What night is it, Calvin?”

  Calvin Markham, a young black man with the aquiline features and high forehead of an Ethiopian aristocrat, said, “I really wouldn’t know the answer to that. I know it’s October, because my hay fever’s gone. That’s as close as I can get, though. Sorry. What time is it?”

  I said, “Nine twenty-six. At nine twenty-seven will you become cheerful and optimistic, or have you just been told you have third-stage syphilis?”

  Calvin and Phil looked at each other. They began to laugh. “Clap,” Calvin said. “I’ve got clap. I don’t have the test results yet, but I know-I know-that I’ve got clap.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Timmy said, “Maybe it’s something else. Can you get hay fever of the crotch?”

  “Not after the first frost,” Calvin said.

  We laughed, but Calvin didn’t. I’m getting another beer.” He went to the bar.

  “Where’d he pick it up?” Timmy said. “The tubs?”

  Phil said, “It was th
e first time he’d been there in six months. Like Carter said, life is unfair.”

  “I thought Nixon said that.”

  “No, it was Carter. To the welfare mothers.”

  “Yeah, but Ford said it first, to the COs.”

  Timmy said, “No, I think it was Anne Baxter to Bette Davis, and when she said it, it made Thelma Ritter wince. Hey, can I say that? Are we still allowed to make Bette Davis jokes, or have they become politically incorrect?”

  “It is politically acceptable,” Phil said, “if you do it once a month, but not if you do it every ten minutes. That is no longer permissible. Thank God.”

  “Well, these are new times, aren’t they? I think I feel an identity crisis coming on. You know, that’s how I found out I was a homosexual. When I was seventeen, I was walking through the park and an older man pulled up beside me, leaned out his car window, and whispered a Bette Davis joke in my ear. I loved it, and all of a sudden I knew.”

  Phil said, “That’s the most touching coming-out story I’ve ever heard. Where has sophistication gone?”

  ‘To Schenectady, I think. A man was arrested in the bus station over there last week for impersonating Monica Vitti. Don’t get me wrong, I mean I love trendy Albany, but really, I think you have to concede that progress is a very mixed blessing.”

  We conceded this unenthusiastically and drank our beer. Calvin came back. The juke box was playing “Good Times” by Chic.

  I asked what anyone had heard about the Kleckner killing.

  “Just what’s in the papers,” Phil said. “The cops still haven’t found the Blount guy. They sure as hell better catch up with him fast and get him locked up. A lot of people are damn nervous with a gay psychopath running around loose, me included.”

  I asked Phil and Calvin if they had known Billy Blount.

  “I remember when he used to come to the center,” Calvin said. “He was kind of snotty and always going around acting like he was better than you were. Most people weren’t too crazy about him.”

  “A lot of repressed anger,” Phil added.

  “Who are Blount’s friends? Do you know anybody who knows him?” They thought about this but couldn’t come up with any names. I said, I’m looking for him, too. Blount’s parents have hired me to find him.”