Red White and Black and Blue

by Richard Stevenson

  Red White and Black and Blue

  by Richard Stevenson

  The motel the air service had booked me into—Walt would be putting up there also—was a locally owned relic called the Hall Creek Lodger Inne that advertised "color TV." The plumbing rattled as I unpacked my few belongings, and the fluorescent light in the bathroom buzzed like an alarm clock going off. But the place smelled of nothing worse than disinfectant, and after dining at the KFC down the road, I came back, read through the Times I'd brought along, and fell asleep. I dreamed yet again of the elegant blond woman jumping into San Francisco Bay.

  The nice woman in the human resources office at HCCC, Melanie Fravel, asked me if I'd like some coffee, and I said thank you, I would. As I mentally rummaged through her files, she walked down the hall and came back shortly with a mug of coffee with the HCCC logo on it and two cinnamon buns, one for each of us.

  "I can't recall that we ever had a visit from the FBI before now, so I have to tell you that this is a special occasion for us. I hope you won't be offended if I tell you that it's actually a bit creepy."

  "Creepy? How so? Most special agents think of ourselves as workaday public servants."

  Ms. Fravel went to work on her sweet bun, which from the looks of her was not her first of the day.

  "It's not creepy because of you, but because this is the second time in—what? three days?—that someone from law enforcement has come asking about Gregory Stiver and his faculty appointment at HCCC five years ago."

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  "Really?" I chuckled knowingly. "Your tax dollars at work.

  What agency was my law enforcement colleague attached to, may I ask?"

  I had shown her a badge I'd picked up at a security company uniform supply store on Suan Plu Road in Bangkok a few years earlier, and she hadn't taken notice of the Thai script on it.

  "Well, he said he was with the Capitol Police in Albany."

  "I'll check with them."

  "I have to say that this gentleman didn't inspire trust and confidence the way you do, Mr. Strachey. He was more rough-hewn."

  "Like some war criminal from the Balkans?"

  "Oh, for heaven's sake, that's it exactly! You've described the gentleman to a T. Do you know him?"

  "Possibly. What was his name? Do you recall?"

  "John Jameson. He said he was Captain John Jameson.

  And that was the name on his ID. My goodness, could his credentials have been fraudulent?"

  "I have no way of knowing. I'd have to examine them first hand or our lab would. What was Captain Jameson's interest in Greg Stiver and his faculty appointment?"

  "The same as yours, if I understood your call this morning.

  He said Mr. Stiver's name had come up in an ongoing criminal investigation involving people still alive. Something about members of the state Assembly whose names had been used wrongly and without their knowledge to give candidates for state jobs a leg up? Is that it?"

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  "It is. I can see that the bureau needs to get its act together and coordinate better with other police agencies. I can't begin to tell you how embarrassed I am."

  "Yes, isn't that how 9/11 happened? Poor coordination between agencies? I mean, I'm not blaming you."

  "Well, we all share responsibility to some degree."

  She ate some of her bun, and I had a chunk of mine.

  She said, "In any case, there was certainly no misuse of our assemblyman's name in that regard. Mr. Louderbush personally called Mitch Darnell, our president, and endorsed Greg Stiver's faculty appointment. Not that any favoritism was involved. Faculty appointments are of course above politics. But we had a sudden opening for an associate professor of history and economics when one of our faculty resigned unexpectedly after her husband was transferred to Florida by his company. Mitch knew that Kenyon had this bright young man he'd previously mentioned to us. And all things being equal, Gregory Stiver filled the bill as well as anyone. We were all shocked and disappointed when Mr.

  Stiver died. And of course here at the college we were back to square one."

  "Assemblyman Louderbush had no other candidate to offer?"

  "Well, no. I don't think it was as if he had a cupboard full of young economists or anything."

  "I'm reassured to hear this. It doesn't help our investigation particularly. But it certainly confirms my understanding that Mr. Louderbush's interest in Greg Stiver was genuine."

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  "I'm sure it was. Mitch said that when Mr. Louderbush personally called to inform him of Greg's suicide, the assemblyman was terribly distraught. He broke down, Mitch said, and was unable to complete the call. Suicide is so mysterious. It just goes against everything we believe about human existence when we get up in the morning. Do you have any idea why Greg killed himself? We never learned any more about him."

  "That's outside the purview of the FBI. But I suppose Assemblyman Louderbush knows something about what happened. You might ask him the next time you see him."

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  Chapter Twenty

  The flight to Burlington took over four hours in our tricycle with a surfboard across it, and my breakfast cinnamon bun was restless in the bumpy air. I asked Walt to wait at the airport; I had tracked Randy Spong down at home with a cell number Bud Giannopolous had come up with, and Spong had agreed to see me if I promised to leave his apartment by four forty-five. I had told him I was investigating the circumstances surrounding Greg Stiver's suicide, including Kenyon Louderbush's possible involvement. This honesty seemed like the approach that would work best with him, and also I wasn't sure I could come up with any more appalling bald-faced lies that day—though in a pinch, for a higher cause, I of course could have.

  Spong lived not far from the UVM campus in an apartment on the second floor of the carriage house behind a pretty old Victorian mansion that seemed to have gone either gay or Mexican: a yellow exterior with lavender trim. Either way, it was a beauty.

  I climbed the outside wooden steps to the apartment, and I saw right away why Spong wanted me out of there by a quarter to five. The elfin young man was bruised and swollen, and five o'clock was probably when his abusive boyfriend came home from work. Spong was stringily muscular, but all his strength was in his arms. His eyes showed no durability at all. He was barefoot in shorts and a T-shirt that said I HEART

  TRANSYLVANIA. He had an angular face with a Roman nose 173

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  and big brown eyes that would have been sexy if they hadn't been black and blue.

  I said, "Thanks for talking to me about Greg. It looks as if you and he had something in common."

  "You mean we were both economists?"

  "Not just that."

  He smiled weakly. "You're so perceptive."

  He shoved some books and papers aside on the couch and sat down, and I sat in one of the old easy chairs in the room, though not the one that directly faced the TV set, which gave off a distinct aura of territoriality. The bookshelves on one wall were stuffed to overflowing, and the art posters on the walls were Franz Kline, Escher, and Lucy and Charlie and the football.

  I said, "But you're not going to end up like Greg, I hope."

  He shrugged. "Not really. If I really hated my life as much as you must think I do, I wouldn't end it. I would change it.

  And eventually I think I will. Just not yet."

  "So you get some kind of satisfaction out of being abused by your boyfriend?"

  "I wouldn't use the word satisfaction. It's more complicated than that. And I like complicated emotions. But, no, I'm not completely det
ached from reality. I know this is basically unhealthy. For me and for Serge."

  "Serge. What is he, some kind of Russian bear? You could really get hurt, you know."

  Another little smile. "Serge isn't Russian. He's Swiss. He's older than I am, and he's not much bigger than I am. I could 174

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  strangle him if I needed to. But strangling Serge is not what I need. What I need is what you see."

  "How do you explain it at work? The bruising and so on."

  "I don't. People can think what they want to think. I'm very good in the classroom, so my position is secure.

  Occasionally a well-meaning colleague tiptoes up to the elephant in the room and asks me if they can help or if they can direct me to someone. I just say no thank you."

  "I take it that in your personal history this all goes way back."

  "Of course."

  "You don't want to be free of that?"

  "No, not yet."

  I checked my watch. We had another hour.

  I said, "Suppose Serge came back while I was here? How would he react?"

  "Well, we're not going to test that supposition. But it wouldn't be pretty."

  "Is he jealous?"

  "You could put it that way. The other person in any of those situations is safe, however. You wouldn't have to be carrying a revolver in that bag you brought in in order to protect yourself. I would be the one who bore the brunt after you left."

  "And that's what you want."

  "I do need to take a day off sometimes. I've learned how to pace myself and stay out of the ERs. We don't want that."

  "Did Kenyon Louderbush beat you?"

  "Of course."

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  "He was your abusive lover?"

  "For a year. Then Greg came along."

  "So Louderbush trolled for boyfriends in SUNY econ classes? That's where you met him?"

  "Kenyon never came to class, no. He was never that subtle. He cruised the men's room in the Performing Arts Center every week or so. I suppose that's where he met Greg, too."

  "Did you resent Greg's replacing you in Louderbush's...is affections the word I want?"

  "For a while. But it was time for me to move on anyway.

  And I knew Greg and wished him well."

  "Were you in Albany when Greg died?"

  "No, I'd moved up here in January. I heard about it from friends. I cried. Which I don't do very often. I learned a long time ago how not to."

  "Some people who knew Greg think Louderbush somehow drove him to suicide."

  A little sigh. "It doesn't work that way. Greg was a grown-up."

  "But pretty unhappy, according to two neighbors of his. He was more ambivalent about the abusive relationship he was in than you are about yours."

  "You think I'm not ambivalent?"

  "I was getting the impression you find it fulfilling."

  "Yes and no. That's called ambivalence, I believe."

  "Okay."

  "Anyway, Greg was not the type to commit suicide."

  "There's a type?"

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  "I mean only that he had quite a muscular ego. He believed in his ideas and he believed in himself. The need to be abused was an important part of Greg's makeup—I assume it had to do with his home life growing up, though I really know nothing about that—but being kicked and hit was not central to his spiritual existence. There was plenty else about him that was sturdy in a conventional way. I really thought he would go on to be successful as a conservative writer and teacher—probably show up on Fox and maybe write speeches for people like Kenyon. That he would just throw all that away seemed so out of character. Greg was somebody who saw a future with him in it. But, as I say, I wasn't all that close to Greg, so maybe there were other demons I never knew about."

  "What do you think of Louderbush's candidacy for governor?"

  "I wish him Godspeed. Maybe he'll win and break the Senate Democratic leadership's nose. They've had it coming for years."

  "I'm working for the Shy McCloskey campaign. We want to expose Louderbush as a closeted gay man who beats up his gay lovers and isn't fit to hold public office."

  An eyebrow went up, though only just perceptibly. "I thought that might be what you were up to."

  "Would you be willing to sign a statement describing your relationship with Louderbush, including the abuse?"

  "Of course not."

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  "You don't see this history of his as a character flaw so serious that it precludes his being in charge of, say, state mental health programs?"

  "What do you think a Governor Louderbush would do?

  Subsidize gay guys beating up their boyfriends? I wouldn't worry about that. Kenyon is a libertarian. He thinks government should mind its own business. And maybe you should, too."

  "Did Louderbush have other gay lovers he abused besides you and Greg?"

  "I believe so. He referred to someone occasionally out in his district. Some hot number he liked to get drunk and pound on. I'm sure there had been others. But even if I knew who these men were, I wouldn't provide you with their names. That would be presumptuous on my part."

  I went round and round with Spong for another fifteen minutes—we both kept a close eye on our watches—but I finally had to accept the near certainty that he would be no help at all in exposing Louderbush. He had some highly theoretical idea in his head as to what it would be like to live normally, but it was so far outside his experience that he simply had no objection to anybody else's making intimate human connections primarily through violence.

  At a quarter to five, I said, "You're looking apprehensive. I guess I had better get going."

  "Thank you, yes. My pulse rate is up. I can actually feel my heart pounding in my chest. In a way, I wish you'd stick around. This is getting exciting. The dread is palpable."

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  There was no point to my telling him there were programs and yada yada. He knew all that. I thanked him and wished him well.

  As I pulled out of the driveway in my rental car, an old Chevy Caprice drove by me, and in the mirror I saw it park in the spot I had just vacated in front of the carriage house. I kept on going.

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  Chapter Twenty-one

  Dunphy said, "Shy wants to meet you before you see Louderbush tomorrow. Can you work it out? I know this is last minute."

  I'd just gotten into my car after the flight back from Burlington and had phoned Timmy and told him I was on my way home. It was just after eight, and I was looking forward to going out for a beer and a plate of something zesty.

  "Yeah, sure. You mean now?"

  "Have you eaten? There's a private dining room at Da Vinci."

  "Give me twenty minutes."

  "Make it fifteen."

  I got Timmy back and told him that instead of joining him for dinner I'd be dining with the man who might be the next governor of New York, depending on how my meeting with Kenyon Louderbush went the next morning.

  Timmy said, "You're a god. But be careful of your ear."

  "It's good I have a spare."

  "I doubt McCloskey will do much more than bend it. He's famous for that."

  "Your boss has dealt with him. Any advice on how to approach McCloskey?"

  "He's a fairly honest guy, and more or less straightforward.

  He's been known to put up with some dubious types on his staff, and I think he's not above Do what you have to and don't tell me about it kinds of operations. But nothing really 180
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  outside the normal murky parameters of American political functioning. Also, he's a good liberal overall and a nice guy.

  Just be up front with him, and you two will hit it off."

  "But aren't I one of those dubious types? Should I tell him stories about how I go about my business? Will he be charmed, or will he get up and run out of the room?"

  "I wouldn't necessarily go into specifics."

  "In the last couple of days I've impersonated a memorial scholarship organizer, a federal agent and a producer for BBC

  America. I shouldn't regale him? Old Irish pols love a good story."

  "No. And whatever you do, don't say anything about Bud Giannopolous. Senator McCloskey mustn't know about him, and for that matter neither should Tom Dunphy. I'm certainly sorry I know more than I should about this criminal. I'm probably borderline culpable."

  "I'm making a note." I thought, but didn't add, What I am dealing with here is a mild paranoiac educated by Jesuits.

  Da Vinci was a relic of Old Albany, a downtown red sauce joint with frayed white linen and potted ferns where pols and judges once rubbed elbows with gangsters. The thugs had long since been replaced with the paid representatives of business and professional organizations who brandished not gats but checkbooks. A doddering maitre d' led me past the scattering of occupied tables and through a doorway in the rear of the restaurant. Then he went out again, shutting the door behind him.

  "Don Strachey, I've heard so much about you! We meet at last. What a pleasure."

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  Dunphy added, "Senator McCloskey has met private investigators before. But none, he was just telling me, with such a colorful history as yours, Don."