I said, "I'll get to the point, trust me. Just tell me what you know about Haig's and Bierly's social life, if any. Don't think context. Pretend we're deconstructionists."
He let out a little sigh that was so recognizable I could almost smell the tuna he'd had for lunch. He said, "Both Bierly and Haig owned and managed businesses out at Millpond. But you already knew that, right? We've seen them out there."
"Right. Bierly runs Whisk 'n' Apron and Haig owned Beautiful Thingies."
"Well," he said, "I have seen Paul Haig somewhere else."
"Where?"
A little tuna-scented silence. "You're going to consider this somewhat pompous," he said.
"Uh-huh."
"I'm not sure of the ethics of my telling you where I saw Haig."
"Oh, the ethics."
"I'm afraid so."
Now Timmy was neither a psychiatrist nor an attorney. Nor was he a priest—although at fourteen he had briefly entertained the idea of becoming one, in which calling he would have been able to wage holy war on his newly discovered unholy sexuality while at the same time dressing and undressing with men. By fifteen, though, he had discovered both liberation theology and Skeeter McCaslin, with whom he enjoyed a sweaty, Clearasil-slick affair for over two years—until they both had graduated from high school and left Poughkeepsie—that was carried out with the stealth of Mossad's operation in getting Adolf Eichmann back to Israel. I once asked Timmy if "Skeeter" was short for "Mosquito"; he just laughed and said most assuredly not.
I said, "Let me guess why you have ethical doubts about telling
me where you saw Paul Haig. Does it have something to do with covert U.S. government activities for dealing with North Korea's nuclear-bomb program?"
He laughed lightly. "I knew you'd see my reaction as kind of— morally overweening."
"Your term, not mine."
"The thing is, if I told you why I'm reluctant to tell where I saw Haig, you'd understand my point. But then you'd also know where I saw him, and I'm the one who would have told you. Can't you just take my word for it that I shouldn't tell you where I saw him? Trust me. Like I'm trusting you."
I said, "Paul Haig's mother is convinced Larry Bierly killed Haig and made it look like suicide. Haig and Bierly were on the outs, she says. Bierly was the beneficiary of Haig's estate and needed money to save his business, according to Mrs. Haig. She told me Bierly has a history of violence and once assaulted and threatened to kill a man. Mrs. Haig wants to hire me to prove the coroner was wrong and the suicide was murder and have Bierly charged. The mother is something of a horror show herself, and I'm trying to evaluate whether or not to hire myself out to her. That's why I'm asking you these questions, Timothy. Now are you going to help me out?"
"AA," Timmy said.
"As in Alcoholics Anonymous?"
"That's where I've seen Haig—with the AA bunch that hangs out on the sidewalk in front of Saint Aggie's before their meetings."
"More than once? He was a regular at that meeting?"
"I'd say off and on over several years. When I worked late and walked home in warm weather, I'd sometimes pass there while they were out smoking and drinking coffee on the sidewalk before the eight o'clock meeting. Sometimes I'd say hello to Haig and he'd say hi back."
"What about Bierly? Was he ever there too?"
"Not that I ever saw. I just saw Paul Haig."
I said, "Timmy, I don't think it's unethical for you to pass this
on to me. AA members are morally bound to protect the privacy of other members. But you're not a member. Anyway, you're telling me, not Le Monde. So what's the big deal?"
"I'm not a member, but I respect AA's confidentiality ethic, and the best way I can show my respect for that ethic is by observing it."
"So by walking past their meeting you fall within AA's ethical penumbra?"
"Yes, I believe I do."
Now it was he who must have gotten a whiff of my gnocchi breath. I said, "Then I appreciate your ethical lapse on my behalf."
"You're welcome to it this one time. It's no big deal. Do you really think Bierly might have killed Haig? I thought Haig died of a drug overdose."
"It was a combination of Elavil and Scotch. The mother is something of a boozer herself and maybe delusionary. But the one thing that's more or less plausible in her account is that she knew her son's mental state and she's certain he had not been suicidal. So I'm going to ask around a little and talk to Bierly before I decide whether or not to take Mrs. Haig's money. She stuffed a retainer check in the bun basket at Le Briquet and shoved it across the table toward me, but I handed it back for now. I'm meeting Bierly for an early dinner at Millpond, so I won't be home until eight or nine."
"I'm glad you're meeting Bierly in the mall if he's violence-prone."
"That's Mrs. Haig's story, but who knows. It is her assertion that after Bierly attacked someone, the guy was going to press charges, but her son bought him off before the cops were notified. And here's the intriguing part. The man Bierly supposedly threatened to kill was Vernon Crockwell."
This elicited a sound that was part guffaw and part snort. "My, my. Herr Doktor Crockwell. Was Bierly in Crockwell's treatment group—getting cured of his sexual deviancy?"
"They both were. It's where they met, according to Mrs. Haig."
"If subjecting yourself to Crockwell isn't incitement to murder, I don't know what is. No wonder Bierly is full of rage and confusion. It sounds as if you should approach him very gingerly, Don."
"I'm meeting him in a mall pizzeria, not in a dark alley. But from what I know of the homosexuality cure programs, people tend to come out of them either zombielike or with a healthy anger directed not at themselves or one another but at the programs they were victimized by. So, not to worry."
"I will. I do."
"I know. Maybe I'll bring you a lovely gift from Beautiful Thingies to help you feel better. A Gucci waterpick cozy. Or a Georg Jensen nipple ring."
"Just watch out for your own beautiful thingie."
"I'll make a note."
3
The darling buds of May had popped out even on the genetically stunted arboreal species around the Millpond Mall parking lot, and the air was fresh after a spring shower. All but glacier-ridden from November to March—and hot and sopping as Bangladesh in summer—Albany during a brief spring and briefer fall was not only fit for human habitation but certifiably pleasant. Crossing the newly washed tarmac, I'd have felt downright jaunty if I'd driven out to Millpond for a movie or a pack of clean sweat socks instead of an interview with the object of a scurrilous accusation of homicide that was conceivably true.
Bierly had suggested we meet at the Irish-pub-style pizza-and-beer joint across from the cineplex (Timmy had once said, "The pizza here is definitely Irish"), and I spotted Bierly at a table in the back, away from the bar and the sports rowdies.
"So, what did Phyllis have to say about me?" he said, looking curious and mildly skeptical but with no apparent fear of what my answer might be. I had told him on the phone only that I was considering investigating Paul Haig's death for Mrs. Haig and that she had suggested I interview Bierly.
"Her opinion of you is poor," I said, pulling up a chair. "But I'll bet you already knew that."
He laughed, but without amusement. "When Paul and I lived together, she'd get lit and call the apartment about once a week. Whenever I answered the phone, she'd start off by saying, 'Well, if it isn't Buttfucker Bierly.' That says it all about what Phyllis Haig thought of me. It also tells you what she really thought of
Paul. . . although she'd never admit what she actually thought of Paul—even to herself. To her little boy, who could do no wrong, she was nice as pie."
He said this less with bitterness than with bemused resignation. What I had taken to be shyness when I'd seen Bierly at gay political events now seemed another kind of reticence altogether, the holding back of a man with reduced expectations of how other people were going to regard
him. I remembered him more clearly now, and he hadn't changed since I'd last seen him: about thirty, with curly black hair and big, wary dark eyes in one of those pleasing but not-quite-locatable, all-over-the-map American faces that suggest some of each of the auld sod and the Rhine and Calabria and maybe even pre-Columbian Vera Cruz. He looked muscular under the white dress shirt he had on, sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm, with a paisley necktie roller-coastering down a well-developed chest.
I said, "Mrs. Haig believes that Paul did not commit suicide. She told me he was not depressively suicidal and would never have taken his own life. Did you know that this was her belief?"
A curt nod. "Oh, I certainly knew that."
"She told you?"
A hard look. "The police are the ones who told me. Phyllis and I have not spoken since Paul's funeral in March." He watched me grimly, waiting for what—it now dawned on me—he had known was coming since I had sat down.
Dragging it out unnecessarily, I said, "And the police raised the possibility with you that Paul's death might not have been suicide?"
He grunted. "They did raise that possibility."
A waiter in a white shirt and black bow tie appeared and asked if we were ready to order or if we needed a few more minutes. I asked for a draft and said we needed a few more minutes. After the waiter went away, I said to Bierly, "What evidence did the police have that pointed away from suicide toward accidental death? Or homicide, of course."
Bierly had been absently rotating a beer glass on the tabletop, but suddenly he stopped. "Now look. I know she thinks I killed Paul," he said tightly. "So let's just quit playing these fucking games. Can we just do that?" His face was red and the muscles in his forearms were taut, and he didn't look so philosophical anymore.
"That suits me," I said.
Bierly started rotating his glass again, faster this time. "One of the cops told me the line of crap she gave them—I was violent, and I was jealous, and I was a crazy queer who murdered Paul for his money, and I tried to cover it up by making it look as if her happy, well-adjusted little boy had committed suicide. Jesus, that woman!" Veins throbbed at the sides of his temples and on the big hairy hand that worked the beer glass.
I said, "You and Phyllis didn't hit it off too well, did you?"
This poor attempt to lighten Bierly's mood failed. He said, "She hired you to get me, didn't she?" Now the veins were bleeping faster. "The police checked me out and found out I had an alibi for the night Paul died—I drove my landlady to Utica, where her daughter had been in a car crash, and we didn't get back until four in the morning—but of course that wasn't enough for Phyllis. Phyllis knows what Phyllis knows. How much is she paying you to frame me, or just harass me, or whatever it is this is supposed to be?"
He regarded me as if I were a plague bacterium deserving of fear, scorn, and, if it could be arranged, extermination. I said, "I have no interest in persecuting you, Larry. I haven't agreed to actually work for Phyllis Haig. I wanted to talk to you first. That's why I'm here. I'm not sure I want to get mixed up in this at all. The situation would interest me only if I became convinced that Paul Haig had actually been murdered. But you seem to be telling me that that was not the case."
The rotating beer glass came to a halt. "Oh, is that what I seem to be telling you? I don't think so."
"You're not telling me that Paul wasn't murdered?"
The waiter came back with my draft and asked if we'd like to order or if we needed a little more time. I said we needed a little more time.
Bierly eyed me levelly and said with what looked like carefully controlled emotion, "Of course I didn't kill Paul. Phyllis is—she's a serious, out-of-control alcoholic, and her brain is—she's a crazy, obnoxious old booze hound. Even when she's sober she's a chronic liar. Probably all the Haigs are. Paul was. Based on what Paul told me about him, his father was a liar too. Unless Paul was lying about that."
He blinked away something he didn't seem to want to remember and went on. "But the fact is, I loved Paul. In spite of everything, Paul Haig was—you're gay, aren't you? I think I've heard about you."
"Yes."
"Have you ever loved a man? I mean, not just sex, but really had a deep love for that person?"
"Yes, I have. Most recently for the last nineteen years."
He looked at me sadly. "That's what I know now that I want. I thought I had it with Paul."
"His death must have been awful."
He shook his head. "Oh, I lost him before that, and that was awful. Paul was the love of my life, I thought—the first man I ever really gave myself over to. I had always been ashamed of being gay. I come from a family and a place where being gay is the most disgusting thing there is. That's why I could never accept my gayness and ended up with that asswipe Vernon Crockwell. But then I met Paul in Crockwell's group, and before long—I think the craziness of everything we were going through in Crockwell's program hit us at the same time and we started holding on to each other just to keep from going insane."
"That probably happens a lot in programs like Crockwell's."
"It happens a lot in Crockwell's own program," Bierly said.
"Dr. Crockwell's Inadvertent Dating Service. But for you and Paul things went awry after a while?"
"Paul was an alcoholic and couldn't control it," he said grimly.
"Like his mother is an alcoholic and his father was when he was living. That's basically what went wrong between us—Paul's drinking. He was sober at first, and going to AA. He'd been in the program off and on for a couple of years—much to Phyllis's consternation. She wanted him to drink, needed him to drink, and so sooner or later he did. It nearly always started up again after one of his lunches with Phyllis. Paul had some other problems too—lying was the main one. But his other flaws all had to do with his drinking, and his being gay, and his parents, especially Phyllis, whose boozy, twisted love was the kiss of death for Paul."
Although I wasn't sure, Bierly didn't seem to mean this literally.
He went on. "How the Haigs functioned at all is a mystery. When Paul was sober and he was being honest about himself and his family, he admitted to me what a mess they were. Lew, his father, was a real-estate developer who almost went to jail once in some kind of bid-rigging scheme. Paul said another time Mr. Haig got himself out of a financial fix he was in by blackmailing a rich senator, and he got caught at that too. Paul's father died of cancer, but cirrhosis of the liver would have killed him even if the cancer hadn't. Phyllis is in total denial about her alcoholism, and I think Paul's sister, Deedee, is probably alcoholic too. Paul tried—he really tried so hard—to be strong and honest and realistic about himself. But he couldn't. Maybe eventually he would have. But I couldn't take it after a while—the lying, the hidden bottles, the binges—and I gave up on him."
"Because he was screwing up your life too?"
"It got to be a matter of emotional, or maybe even physical, survival. Paul sometimes did some pretty crazy stuff when he was drunk, and sometimes I'd go along with it and regret it the next day. But mostly, I just couldn't stand not knowing which person he'd be from one day to the next. Finally, just after Christmas, when he really went off the deep end with a bottle in his hand, I got my own place and moved out."
I said, "The pros all seem to agree that in these unhappy situations you have to save yourself first. How did Paul react?"
Bierly shrugged. "He got drunk."
"I'm sorry it turned out that way. I hope you'll do better with the next man in your life."
He looked around to make sure we weren't being overheard. Then he leaned toward me and said in a breaking voice, "How could anyone think I killed Paul? Even that idiotic, deluded Phyllis—how could she say such a thing? I loved Paul. I couldn't live with him, and I couldn't be his lover anymore, but I still loved him. I could no sooner have killed Paul than—" Bierly looked nauseated at the thought—"than I could kill anybody. I'm just not a violent person. Oh, I have a temper. People will tell you. I
can lose it, like a lot of people. But take another person's life? It's just not in me. I don't know if I could kill another person even in a war or in self-defense. So when Phyllis told the police I killed Paul and they called me in and questioned me—it just made me want to throw up."
I said, "But you don't think Paul killed himself."
"No."
"And you don't think his overdose was an accident either?"
"No, I don't think it was."
"Why not?"
"As for an accident, it wouldn't be like him. Paul was careful about pills. He never mixed drugs and alcohol. I was surprised when he told me he was on Elavil, just because any kind of drugs made him nervous. He didn't even like it when I'd smoke some weed or whatever once in a while. Alcohol was Paul's drug of choice."
I said, "And why not suicide?"
He shook his head emphatically. "Not a chance. Was Paul a nervous wreck? Oh, yes, poor Paul, he was one anxious son of a bitch—pun intended. He smoked too much, and he worked too hard, and the strain of trying unsuccessfully not to be the drunk his mother wanted him to be was brutal for Paul. But he coped. He found ways not only to survive but to function. He was a true Haig in that respect. And there's another thing: Paul had not only been on antidepressants and feeling relatively relaxed the week
before he died, but he hadn't been drinking either. I either saw him or talked to him on the phone almost every day, and I'd gotten to the point where I could tell if Paul had been drinking. He hadn't. He'd even started going to AA meetings again, he said."
The waiter, probably under corporate orders, was hovering, so I signaled for him and ordered a pizza of his choice. He said sausage and broccoli would be nice, and we said okay.
I asked Bierly, "With Paul's improved outlook, did you think there was a chance you and he might get together again?" More tentatively, I said, "Or did he think so?"
"Paul brought it up," he said, his voice going unsteady again. "As for us living together, I didn't want to. I told him I'd think it over, but I don't think I could have done it. At a certain point last winter—I can even remember the day—I realized I just didn't love Paul anymore in that way."
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