Timmy said, "Or even gothic."
I reached another of the therapy group by phone. Eugene Cebulka, in East Greenbush, agreed to meet me at seven-thirty at a Chinese restaurant we both knew out on Route 20.
I was about to call the hospital and Al Finnerty when the phone rang and Vernon T. Crockwell, sounding stricken, said, "I need your help quite badly, Donald. I'll pay you whatever your highest rate is. Just please do everything you can to find out who shot Larry Bierly—and killed Paul Haig if he was murdered and that's part of whatever this horrible thing is that's happening to me."
"To you, Vernon?"
"The police have questioned me again, and now they say they've found the gun that was used to shoot Larry Bierly. They say they found it in the dumpster behind my building!"
"Uh-oh."
"Can you imagine!"
"Yep."
"Someone is doing this to me!"
"That's what it looks like, Vernon."
"It's unjust. It's just terribly unjust. Now, Donald—Norris Jackacky tells me you are a fighter for justice."
"Me and the Green Hornet—and Al D'Amato too. Is he a hero of yours, Vernon?"
"Donald, are you going to help me or not? I must know! My wife must know! Doris is beside herself with fright and revulsion that this should be happening to our family, and the poor
woman's near-hysteria is entirely justified."
I said, "I heard the tape."
"Oh. I see. So then you know that I never said anything illegal or unprofessional, strictly speaking."
"You threatened Haig. He threatened you and then you threatened to stop him dead in his tracks."
"I was speaking figuratively, as part of a therapeutic technique. I was merely trying to elicit a response. Although I do appreciate that the untrained lay observer might misunderstand."
"Vernon," I said, "you sure are full of it. You know, I'm starting to believe less and less of anything you tell me. I don't, for example, any longer consider plausible your reasons for trying to hire me. You say it's because I'm the best around. But I know and Norris Jackacky knows that there are other excellent investigators in Albany who are not homosexual, your particular bete noire. So please tell me the truth now. Why me?"
A long silence. I could hear him breathing hard. Then he said, "I'm ashamed to—what I mean to say is, I am simply unable to be as candid on some points as you might consider it appropriate for me to be. Let's just say, I have my reasons."
I said, "Are you gay yourself?"
"Of course not! That is perfectly absurd."
"Who is Steven St. James?" I said.
More shallow breathing. Then: "I have no idea. Steven who?"
"Vernon, for someone in your line of work, where sincerity— or at least the impression of sincerity—must count for a lot, you're a terrible liar." When this got no response except what sounded like a little mewing sound, I said, "I take it you have no alibi for last night when Bierly was shot, it being Thursday. Just like the night Paul Haig died."
"That's correct, unfortunately. No, I don't."
"One of three likely conclusions can be drawn from the fact, Vernon, that bad things happen to good people from one of your therapy groups on Thursday nights when you are, you say, alone in your office. One conclusion could be, it's a funny coincidence. A second, more interesting conclusion might be, you did it—
killed Paul Haig, shot Larry Bierly, and tossed the gun used to shoot Paul in the garbage bin behind your building."
"Oh, no. My Lord, how could I ever do such things! And how could I be so stupid that I'd throw the gun away in my own trash?"
"I don't know, Vernon. Psychology is your department. Maybe you were distraught and you panicked. Of course, a third obvious conclusion would be, somebody who knows your schedule is setting you up—committing a crime or crimes on Thursday night and then sending the letter and the tape to the police to implicate you, knowing you're alibiless, and throwing the gun in your dumpster for the police to find."
"Yes, yes, exactly. But who? Before he was shot, Donald, I thought it was probably Larry Bierly who was, as you term it, setting me up. But now it seems to be someone else entirely."
"Why did you think it was Bierly?"
"Well, Larry was—angry with me."
"Oh, that's a good reason."
"I mean," Crockwell said, "Larry was both so angry at himself for continuing treatment for as long as he did, and so angry at me for providing a therapy that he had lost faith in, that eventually he became totally consumed with hatred for me—unhinged, I must say, acting out uncontrollably."
"How do you know that? What did he say or do?"
Crockwell said nothing.
"Vernon?"
After a quarter-minute of labored breathing, he said, "Will you help me or won't you?"
"I don't know. I need to know more before I decide. What's the deal with you and Haig and Bierly? There's something you're not telling me."
No reply.
"You said that until yesterday you thought Bierly might be setting you up. Do you also think he killed Paul Haig?"
"I don't know."
"How does Steven St. James fit into this?"
"I don't know."
"Vernon, for a man on his knees begging for mercy, you're doing little of substance to gain my confidence."
"I'm offering you money," he whined, "and I'm not withholding any information that bears directly on the matter at hand. Can't you grasp that, Donald?"
"No, I can't. How do you know the information you're obviously withholding doesn't bear directly on the matter at hand? If you want me to work for you, I have to be the judge of that."
He let out a little moan of despair and hung up.
I sat for a minute waiting for the phone to ring again, but it didn't.
I called Al Finnerty at Division Two and caught him, he said, on the way out the door after a long but surprisingly productive day.
"Productive how?" I said.
"We think we've got the gun used to shoot Bierly, a mean little Raven MP-25, the weapon of choice for the playground criminals of America. Guess where we found it, Strachey?"
"In Crockwell's dumpster."
"You talked to Crockwell?"
"Just now. He's freaked, Al."
"So, Crockwell is your client? There's no harm done in getting that on the record. It won't change a thing, as far as I'm concerned. I'm just glad to know somebody's paying you a fat fee, Strachey."
"I'm not saying Crockwell is or isn't my client. I'm not saying the Infant of Prague is or isn't my client. I'm not saying because, for now, for a variety of reasons, I can't say. Do the ballistics check out on the gun?"
"Don't know yet. I can't get test results till Monday at the earliest."
"What about prints?"
"The same."
"But you're not charging Crockwell with anything?"
"Not just yet."
"How is Bierly doing?"
"Better. He's conscious. He wants to see you, Strachey."
"Good. I'll drop by. I take it he didn't ID who shot him."
"Nah. The shooter was crouched beside Bierly's car in the dark and fired across the roof of the car as Bierly was opening the door. Bierly thinks he was wearing a ski mask, but it happened so fast, he said, he wasn't even sure of that."
"That's not helpful."
"Bierly asked if we'd check on Vernon Crockwell's whereabouts last night. He said Crockwell ought to be our prime suspect. This was before we searched the dumpster. Bierly didn't know about the gun. Interesting, isn't it?"
"Yeah, interesting. Why did Bierly think it might have been Crockwell? Did he say?"
"He said Crockwell hated him for leaving his therapy group and taking Paul Haig with him. But that sounds weak to me."
"Me too, Al."
"Shrinks must have people coming and going and mad at them all the time. I've never heard of that leading to homicide."
"Me either."
"
But Crockwell's still our best bet here. We've got the letter and the tape of him threatening Paul Haig, and he's got no alibi. Even if his prints aren't on the gun, if it's the one that shot Bierly, we'll probably have to charge him. I suppose all you gays will be delighted to hear that."
My grasp tightened on the receiver. I said, "That's not the strongest evidence to present to a jury, Al—a vague threat against a friend of Bierly's, the lack of an alibi, and a gun anybody could have tossed in Crockwell's dumpster. It's awfully circumstantial. Won't the DA need a little more?"
"Oh, we'll put it together," he said. "Especially if the ballistics check out. If Crockwell is your client, Strachey, I hope you got paid up front."
"I hope you're not being overly optimistic, Al." Or overly anything else.
"I want to close this out by the end of the month if I can. The worst that can happen is the DA will charge Crockwell, and
because he's a professional type with no previous record he'll want to deal—plead to aggravated assault instead of attempted murder. And if he didn't do it, that'll come out in the wash too, and the case will be thrown out or he'll be acquitted. I've got a lot of faith in our system, Strachey. However it shakes out, we'll all have done our best, and that's what counts."
I said, "But even if Crockwell is innocent and sooner or later he's cleared, the chances are, once you shove him into the sausage machine he'll come out sausage, in the sense that he'll be ruined professionally."
"Well, I've heard the psychology field is overcrowded," Finnerty said, and I shuddered.
Before I left for my dinner appointment in East Greenbush, I gave Timmy a quick rundown of my conversations with Crockwell and Finnerty.
He said, "So what are you going to do?"
"I don't know."
"Some choices you've got. You can work for Crockwell, who's probably being sandbagged unfairly but who's a social menace who should be put out of business, though not for all the wrong reasons. You can go with Bierly, who's been victimized in all kinds of ways and deserves support, except he's apparently pathologically fixated on Crockwell in a way that clouds rather than clears the air. Or you can sign on with Phyllis Haig and use her money to get to the bottom of this thing, even though Larry Bierly probably didn't kill Paul, and she'd be paying you to prove that he did. Or, of course, you could just back away from the whole thing and let the Albany cops handle it in their inimitable fashion—with lives smashed to pieces in a random and whimsical way, law enforcement as theater of the absurd."
"That nicely sums up the hopelessly paradoxical nature of the situation, Timothy. Thank you."
"So which is it? Not to be overly pushy, but I guess now you have to go one way or the other."
"Not yet," I said. "I don't know enough yet. There's been so much evasiveness and dissimulation by all the parties in this
whole affair that I'm sure there's a larger picture I'm not seeing and that's critical to my understanding the little I do know— about Paul Haig's death, and Larry Bierly's shooting, and Crockwell's fear and his odd attempts to hire me, of all people, and Phyllis Haig's attempts to blame her son's death on Bierly, and— Steven St. James. How is St. James connected to Bierly and Haig and, apparently, Crockwell? And what about Moody and Stover, the violent homophobes in the therapy group? There's just too much I need to know before I can be sure which way to head, and in whose employ."
"It sounds as if you should have a staff of fifty investigators working on this," Timmy said. "I hope it doesn't take you six months to sort it out."
"It could be time-consuming, I guess. But I'll take it one day at a time. I mustn't let myself become a slave to the temporal realm."
"True, true, but the mortgage is due on the first of June. Keep that in mind, will you?"
It was hell loving a man who got all his values from dead white European males, but to have done such was my complex destiny.
12
I saw no single men seated either at the bar or in the dining room of Would You Like to Take a Wok. But a male-female couple at a rear table seemed to be waiting for someone, and when they saw me peering quizzically, the man got up and came my way.
"Would you be looking for Gene Cebulka?"
"Yes, I'm Don Strachey."
"Glad to meet you. I brought my wife along. I hope that's okay."
"Sure, that's up to you."
He was a well-scrubbed, ruddy-faced man in his late twenties in crisply laundered khakis and a pale pink polo shirt that matched the restaurant linen. He had a broad grin and a country-boy lope, and he could have passed for a soda-fountain boy on a Saturday Evening Post cover from 1952 had it not been for his ravaged head. Cebulka's honey-colored hair was thick in spots but in others it was missing altogether. This was a result not of disease, it soon became apparent, but of Cebulka's habit of absently tugging at clumps of his hair as he spoke. This seemingly pleasant young man with a look and demeanor as wholesome as any I'd run into in recent decades was, clump by clump, pulling his hair out by the roots.
"And this is my wife, Tracy," Cebulka said, smiling, as he twisted and tugged at his head. "Tracy, this is Mr. Strachey."
"Don. Nice to meet you, Tracy."
She was freckled and pretty and slight under a mainsail of
permed hair broad enough to launch a brigantine. She looked scared to death of me, but squeaked out, "Hi."
"Tracy thought if I was going to meet a good-looking man in a restaurant, she better come along and keep an eye on me," Cebulka joked, but Tracy just looked embarrassed. I probably did too.
Then it was my turn to put my foot in it. "So, how long have you honeymooners been married? Six months? Six weeks?"
"Eleven years," Tracy said sadly.
"Oh. So—you were already married then, Gene, when you went into Vernon Crockwell's program. I'd have guessed you were younger."
"I'm twenty-eight," he said, "and Tracy's twenty-seven."
"Ah."
"I just figured," Cebulka said brightly, "that I better get my ducks in a row before Tracy and I started a family. If you catch my meaning." He winked.
I was about to come up blank but was saved by the waiter, who arrived with red-tassled menus the size of the gates to Nanking. The three of us set about studying these and after a time summoned the waiter and placed our order for an assortment of multicolored edibles in cornstarch. Tracy Cebulka glanced at me nervously, and Gene smiled and twisted his hair.
When the waiter was gone, I said, "Gene, I guess your experience with Vernon Crockwell's program was a happy one. And it achieved the outcome you desired."
"That's true," he said, his fingers busy above. "I used to be turned on by men, but that was strictly no-win. I had a chance to be straightened out, so to speak, and I availed myself of the opportunity. Fortunately, Dr. Crockwell's way did the trick."
"Now Gene plays Softball with the guys," Tracy said.
This was followed by another silence. After a moment, I said, "It's hard to argue with success."
They both looked at me, Tracy unmoving, Gene twisting away at a recalcitrant clump.
"Although," I said, "Crockwell's therapy apparently doesn't do
the trick for everybody. Paul Haig and Larry Bierly, for instance. Their departure from the group was a bitter one, I'm told."
"I saw on the news Larry was in a shooting," Cebulka said. "I hope he's going to pull through. That's a terrible tragedy after Paul passing away and all."
I said it looked as if Bierly was going to be okay.
"I'm glad," Cebulka said. "Larry's sincere in his beliefs. I guess he turned into a kind of gay libber, didn't he?"
"Kind of."
"I'm broad-minded. If that's what makes a person happy, I say, hey, go for it. But going with guys never made me happy. It just made me feel guilty as heck."
"Gene used to come home late at night from Albany and just sit out on the porch feeling like a total asshole," Tracy said. "Even if it was ten below."
"Now I never go
to Albany at all anymore," Cebulka said. "I don't need to. I haven't set foot in the place for—it'll be seven months next Wednesday."
"He's turned into a real stay-at-home," Tracy said. "Which I happen to like."
"A real couch potato," Cebulka said with a laugh.
"Of course, it would be nice if he got off the couch once in a while too," Tracy said, her hopeful look fading. "Especially like not falling asleep downstairs every single solitary night of the week."
"I'm hooked on Jay Leno," Cebulka said with a sheepish grin. "What can I tell you? Jay just cracks me up."
More silence. Then I said, "But tell me, Gene. Back when you were still in the group, I've gotten the impression that things didn't always go so smoothly for everybody. That there was a certain amount of tension and conflict."
"Well, naturally there was going to be," Cebulka said. "Here we were, dealing with a lot of heavy-duty stuff from our formative years. Deformative years, in our cases. Since homosexuals don't bond with their fathers normatively, they have to learn later on how to bond with other men in a normal way. That's what we
were trying to do all the time, and it was no Sunday-school picnic, believe you me. It was hard work, and we were all working a double shift—getting rid of our old habits of trying to get into guys' pants and practicing at the same time how to be a buddy and a pal and—you know—getting in touch with our true guy-ness. People would blow off steam sometimes, which is understandable. Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it can be a dickens of a time getting it back in."
They both looked at me. Cebulka had a tight grip on a knot of hair and was working it loose.
I said, "Gene, when you heard about Paul Haig's suicide, did it surprise you?"
"No," he said without hesitation. "I was sad to hear it, but it didn't really surprise me."
"Why not?"
"Because I think what Paul really wanted in life was the love of a good woman. And when he quit Dr. Crockwell's treatment program, he probably figured he was dipped, as far as a woman."
"Do you have a particular woman in mind?"
"What? You mean besides Tracy?"
"I mean for Paul."
"Oh, I don't know who it would be. That would be up to Paul. But Larry was—I think he could keep being a homosexual and it wouldn't bother him. He sure was one tough nut to crack for Dr. Crockwell. Poor ol' Crocky. But I think Paul could have been saved if Larry hadn't led him down the garden path. Paul didn't have the willpower to resist temptation, though, and I guess he was so ashamed, he could no longer go on living. And I can relate to that. Paul has my deepest sympathy. Without Dr. Crockwell's help and Tracy's supportiveness, there but for the grace of God go I, possibly."
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