"And it's a good thing too," Timmy said. "Four might have put a dent in your self-esteem."
"You never know."
Schuylers Landing was one of those old Hudson River villages whose existence grew precarious in the last century when
bridges replaced ferries but which had somehow survived into the age of antique shops, upscale country-charm emporia, and bed-and-breakfasts for purposes of leisure instead of necessity.
According to the waitress in the breezy riverfront cafe where Timmy and I had a couple of nice Gruyere-and-guacamole panini for lunch, Steven St. James's address was inland, away from the river, and south of the center town on a road off Route 9G.
We found the place with no trouble. St. James lived—Mellors-like—in a converted outbuilding a hundred yards from the house that 175 years earlier would have been the centerpiece of a prosperous landowner's estate. The main house was a brick federal-style manse surrounded by clumps of lavender irises and a couple of immense oak trees that were as graceful as ferns.
St. James's much smaller white clapboard place looked as if it had once been a kind of barn or storage building. It had a board fence around it with wire cattle fencing tacked to the boards, probably to pen in the two dogs that, as Timmy and I stood at the gate, peered at us with interest. One was a big black lab, the other a collie. The gravel parking area outside the fence was empty except for my Mitsubishi. We saw no sign of St. James's VW Rabbit.
"Hello!" I yelled. "Anybody home?"
"These dogs look friendly enough," Timmy said. "Why don't we just walk up and knock at the door?"
"They're friendly, yes. But look—they're slobbering."
"That was a close call, Commando Don."
"Oh, okay, come on."
I unlatched the gate, and Timmy followed me in. I shut the gate and we walked up to St. James's house, the dogs snuffling obsequiously and salivating on our hands.
"We have to remember to get a couple of these," Timmy said.
"Uh-huh."
I knocked at the door.
After a moment Timmy said, "It's eerily quiet."
"Well, it's quiet."
I knocked again. When I got no response I walked across the
shaggy lawn and peered through a window. I saw a living room-dining room with a couch, some chairs and tables, a desk with a PC on it, and shelves with a lot of books. I strained to make out the titles, but it was dim in the house and I had no success. The newspaper on the couch appeared to be the Catskill Daily Mail, the nearest daily paper. Timmy tried to distract the dogs while I walked around behind the house, but they wanted to come along with me, so we all went, the dogs wetly licking any exposed human skin they could get at.
"These doggies are soon going to need a drink of water," Timmy said.
I peered into a back window and saw a kitchen that was unremarkable. A door leading into it was next to the window, and I turned the knob. Locked.
"I don't think this is legal," Timmy said. "A man's home is his castle. It's English common law, going way back."
A voice said, "Is there something I can help you with perhaps?" The voice was male and its tone unfriendly.
We turned to see a man who was not Steven St. James striding around the corner of the house. He was about seventy and distinguished-looking in a Windsor-ish, end-of-the-line kind of way, and was wearing—weirdly for a sunny afternoon in May—what once had been called, and maybe still was called in the better houses of the Hudson valley, a smoking jacket. His royal-blue display handkerchief matched his ascot.
"Hi, I'm looking for Steven St. James," I said. "I'm Don Strachey and this is Timothy Callahan, and we're old friends of Steven's. Any idea where he is?"
The debonair man had four fingers of his right hand thrust into the pocket of his jacket, like a J. Press model striking a pose in 1932, and he did not remove his hand to shake the one I extended.
"I don't believe Steven was expecting you," the man said coldly. "He never mentioned to me that he was expecting visitors." The dogs paced around restlessly but did not approach the man in the jacket.
"We just decided to pop in at the last minute," Timmy said. "But I guess Steve's not here."
"No, of course Steven is not here. The farm is open now."
The farm. When he didn't elaborate, I said, "You must be Steven's neighbor."
"Yes, I am. Steven is my tenant and my neighbor. And my friend."
"Oh, so you must be—"
"Going now. And so, may I suggest, should you."
"Okay. Love your cologne," I said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"It's the same cologne Steven uses. I got a good whiff of it the other day when I spent some time with Steven in Albany."
His perfect posture weakened a little. "Steven was in Albany?"
"On Friday. How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Central Avenue?"
Timmy glowered at me and began to move around the man in the jacket. The snuffling dogs followed Timmy.
"Tell me your names again," the man said, with much less self-assurance than before, "and I'll let Steven know that you called."
I brought out one of my cards and handed it to him. "Ask him to get in touch with me some time this weekend. Otherwise I can look him up at the farm. Thank you."
"You're welcome." He blushed—blushed—and said, "I knew Steven had other friends in Albany. That I understood. I can't object to that. It's just that—I never met any of them before."
Timmy said, "Well, we aren't close friends of Steven or anything. Not that close."
"Oh. I see." But he looked unconvinced.
As we drove away, Timmy said, "You were awfully nasty with that guy."
"He was awfully nasty with us."
"Of course. We were trespassing on his property. Also, he felt threatened. He's probably buying himself—directly or
indirectly—a little comfort not otherwise available to someone so geographically and otherwise isolated."
I said, "There were two cars in his driveway, a Continental and a Caddy. I'll bet he's married."
"So?"
"So he's sucking a dick that's been God knows where and bringing who knows what in the way of viruses and bugs and bacteria into that house."
"That is wild, wild speculation, Don. You don't know if that man so much as enjoyed a glass of port with St. James. And you certainly have no idea what St. James does or did in Albany with Bierly or Haig or Crockwell or anybody else."
"No, but on the latter point I do know that when I pressed St. James on the subject, he told me in a panic, 'You don't want to know,' and then he fled."
"You're right. There's that."
"St. James will get the word from Lord Chatterley that I know where he lives and he'll think I know where he works. For those reasons, I think Steven will be ready to enlighten me as to what he says I don't want to know, even though I do, I do."
"I see what you mean when you put it that way. You're kind of pissed off, aren't you?"
"Shouldn't I be?"
"Yes, I understand that. But it's not pretty."
"Something even less pretty got Paul Haig murdered and Larry Bierly shot."
"I guess I should try to keep all that in perspective."
"Do. You can do something else too."
"What?" His tone was apprehensive.
"Write down the plate numbers of the Caddy and the Lincoln. I memorized them." I recited them and Timmy wrote the numbers and letters on the back of an oil-change receipt, which I stuffed in my jacket pocket. On the way back to Albany, neither of us had much to say.
17
Roland Stover's apartment was in the basement of a frame house with flaking gray paint on one of the marginal blocks of Morton Avenue across from Lincoln Park. The entrance was from a narrow alleyway between his and the nearly identical house next door, and although the May afternoon was bright, by five-thirty darkness had all but set in down in Stover's depths.
"Oh, we can defini
tely tell you all there is to know about those two," Stover said with a sneer. "Paul Haig and Larry Bierly were a couple of unrepentant buttfuckers, and they both got what they had coming."
"You wouldn't believe what a disruptive influence those two were in Dr. Crockwell's program," Dean Moody put in. "Larry especially. All that time he was there pretending to want to be sexually repaired like the rest of us, and he was a secret deviant! That big buttfucker was just toooo much."
Stover was hulking and wild-eyed, with an erratic crewcut, bad skin, and a Wal-Mart name tag on his white dress shirt. Moody was slight and fluttery and full of manic intensity that must have struck terror in the hearts of the parents he had sued for turning him into a homosexual. After all Mr. and Mrs. Moody had been through, it must have been small compensation that they had gotten to go on Montel.
"Repentance is the way of the Lord," Stover said, jabbing his finger my way. "But never once did those two buttfuckers ask forgiveness for their transgressions. Even in the beginning, I had my suspicions about those two. They said they were unhappy,
and they said they were confused, and they were this, and they were that. But never once did those two admit that they were abominations in the eyes of the Lord, abominations to be cast out!"
I said, "Dr. Crockwell's treatment approach wasn't religious in nature, was it? I was under the impression it was more scientific. Secular, anyway."
"Well, yes, that is true," Moody said. "You see, Roland here is an extremely spiritual person, so he tends to see things that way. I'm trying hard to become more spiritual myself. He's helping me. I'd always wanted to get in closer touch with my Lord and Savior, but there were certain things in my life that stood in the way."
I said, "You mean like buttfucking."
They both nodded eagerly. They were seated together on a tattered old plaid couch, Stover's large arm stretched out along the back of the couch behind Moody's little permed hairdo but not, so far as I could see, touching it.
Stover said, "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death.' Leviticus."
"I suppose it's a big theological question," I said, "as to who shall actually put the buttfuckers to death. I take it that in your view, Roland, it's a dirty theological job, but somebody has to do it. Or have I misunderstood your position?"
"That is an important question," Stover said, poking a thick finger my way again. "And if the liberals didn't control the media and the Supreme Court and the special interests, we'd have capital punishment in this country for sexual deviants. I've read that down in Washington there are buttfuckers under every rock who have Bill Clinton in their pocket and under their thumb. In fact, you might as well just paint the White House lavender."
"Mincin' Bill Clinton," Moody said, waving a mocking limp wrist.
"Clinton is gay? I never heard that."
"Oh, honey, where have you been?" Moody said. "No, really.
Gennifer Flowers was one of his beards, and so was that other one."
I said, "I suppose you arrived at this conclusion based on the president's initial position on gays in the military."
"Oh, no," Moody said. "It's not just that. I've seen copies of depositions from men who have slept with Missy Clinton. You can send away for those."
"Well," I said, "this explains a lot."
They both nodded sagely.
"Tell us about your study on deviance," Stover said. "Did you say on the phone that you're doing a deviance survey for Dr. Crockwell?"
"Yes, I am. He couldn't provide me the names of any group members, of course. But Larry Bierly did, and I'm grateful that even though you hate Larry's guts you're still willing to participate in the study."
"Will you be asking questions about our former sexual practices?" Moody said.
They both looked expectant, but I said, "No, it's treatment programs that I'm most interested in. I'm doing a study on comparative methods of treatment for deviance."
They both said, "Oh."
"I'd like to hear more about Dr. Crockwell's program from the patient's point of view. The dynamic of the group you were in interests me especially."
They both looked bored. Group dynamics was not what they hoped to discuss with me.
"The group part wasn't all that great," Moody said. "I mean, it was important—learning guy things and all. But for Roland and I, the individual treatment Dr. Crockwell had to offer was what really turned things around for us."
"What did the individual treatment consist of?"
"Aversion therapy, it's called. Where the incorrect sexual conditioning that was done by our parents is corrected by punishing wrong sexual thoughts and rewarding right ones."
"Zapping the demons," Stover added. "Casting out the evil spirits."
"Electric shocks were used?"
"Yeah, everybody went over to Dr. Crockwell’s three times a week," Moody said. "You could do it two ways. You'd get wired up with electrodes and look at slides of naked women and hot guys. If you were on automatic, you'd get zapped whenever the picture showed humpy guys but not when it was tits and pussy. Or you could do it yourself—zap yourself when guys were on and you started getting hard. If you stayed stiff, you could turn up the dial till it really hurt a whole lot, and that usually did the trick."
"It's remarkable," I said, "that so simple a procedure could actually reverse sexual orientation."
"It's not just the therapy," Moody said. "It's a deep commitment, too, to normalcy."
Stover added, "The Lord would have made Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve, if he had meant for men to fuck each other in the butt."
"Are you ever tempted to backslide?" I asked. "No pun intended."
"Once in a while," Moody said, looking troubled. "Dr. Crockwell told us this would occur in some patients. But Roland and I have figured out ways of dealing with that."
They both looked at me uncertainly.
I said, "How?"
"We look at dirty pictures together," Stover said. "Or once in a while videos."
I said, "I guess that falls under the heading of giving the devil his due."
Stover looked at me suspiciously, and Moody wasn't sure he liked the sound of that either.
I said, "How do you create the electric shocks? I hope you're not risking death or serious injury with a toaster or anything like that, guys."
"Oh, no, no," Stover said. "We use a safe device like Dr. Crockwell's. The one we have is called a Lustbuster. You can get them
through Christian religious-supply catalogs. Would you like to see it?"
"We could demonstrate how it's used," Moody said, "if you'd be interested for your survey."
My impulse was to dive through a window. But that might have been seen as overreacting, so I said, "The device sounds interesting, but I'd like to know more about the group therapy sessions. It must have been difficult having men in the group who resisted treatment at one level or another, unlike you eager beavers."
"I can tell you it was a real bitch," Moody said. "You just felt like you were surrounded by traitors."
I said, "That wasn't true for the first eight months, was it? I thought Larry and Paul pretty much observed the spirit of the occasion until they decided to leave. And that all happened in just one session last fall."
"Oh, I'm sure that's what Miss La-di-da Larry would have you believe," Moody said. "That they were such angels. Well, my dear, I can assure you that they were not."
"Dr. Crockwell was there to help us with our sexual dysfunctions," Stover said, panting and jabbing his finger. "And Paul and Larry were always bringing all kinds of problems that had nothing to do with deviancy—drinking and drugs and money problems and stuff like that. As for those, we were there to discuss just one topic," Stover said, brandishing a finger.
And I knew by then what that was. I said, "Who had the alcohol and drug problem?"
"Paul was an alcoholic and Larry was a druggie," Mood
y said. "They were always dishing and criticizing each other, and one thing I hold against Dr. Crockwell is, he let them go on like that too much. We weren't there to deal with topics like that, and we didn't need to hear it. Like Roland says, we'd paid our money to talk about one thing."
"But wouldn't you say that drugs and alcohol are a common way for men unhappy with their sexuality to cope with it, or avoid coping with it? It's often part of the picture that has to be addressed."
"'But not always bickering the way those two did," Moody said. "Take it to AA or NA, Grace, or keep it on the street."
"I'd heard Paul was an alcoholic," I said, "but I wasn't aware of Larry's drug problem. What kind of drugs did he do?"
Stover looked blank, but Moody's recall on the subject was instant. "He was into both Ecstasy and acid, I know. They had a real catfight over it right in the group one time, and Paul accused Larry of spending money that he needed for his business on drugs. Of course, Paul was the one who was always in trouble over money, and Larry reminded him of it and told him to just butt out."
"It didn't surprise me one bit," Stover said, "when I heard that Paul ended up dead in the gutter. Since he had turned his back on righteousness, it was the best thing he could do for himself."
I said, "Paul may not have killed himself. He may have been murdered. The police are looking into the possibility."
Neither of them reacted dramatically to this news. Moody pursed his lips and got a quizzical look, and Stover just kept looking hard and mean and unaffected by the fate of a man he didn't approve of.
"Who do they think did it?" Moody finally said.
"They don't know. Who can you think of who might have had a reason to kill Paul? Or hated him enough to want to?"
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