Shock To The System

by Shock To The System (lit)

  "Along with what?"

  "We did something that I knew was wrong."

  "Uh-huh."

  "We'd never have done it if we hadn't been flying high. I know that's no excuse."

  "No, it never is."

  "But there was nobody to say, Wait a minute, no, this is crazy, it's cruel, it's torture, it's—illegal. We were all under the influ­ence—a terrible, terrible mistake."

  "You and Paul and Larry and—?"

  "The three of us."

  "No Emil?"

  He laughed once. "God, no. Emil? Where did you get an idea like that?"

  I could no longer remember. I said, "I'm not sure. But aren't you—involved with him? Look, I'm gay and you don't have to hold back. I'm hip to these things."

  "Oh, well, I'm glad you're hip," St. James said, with a Mellors-like sneer. "I knew you were gay—Larry told me—but I didn't know you were hip too. That makes this whole thing so much easier."

  I said, "So you and Emil aren't an occasional item?"

  " 'An occasional item.' Such a sensitive way of putting it, Strachey. No, we're not. Emil happens to be in love with me. He sometimes imagines that I'm in love with him—which I'm not— and that I hold my passions in check because he's married and because of class differences. But it's all in his head. I haven't done a thing to either lead him on or to make him believe I'm abstain­ing from sex with him for any reason other than that I don't happen to be interested. I do like him—he's a sweet old guy from another age who's as gay as I am but who grew up differently and who's trying to find a way to be true to his sexual nature, but can't. Sometimes I wish I was attracted to him, because he's a decent man and deserves better. But I'm not attracted, and our relationship exists entirely within Emil's fantasy life—which is real enough to him that he's powerfully jealous of the other men in my life, real and imagined."

  I said, "I misunderstood the situation. Sorry."

  "Oh, no problem, no problem at all. God."

  "So Emil wasn't involved in—'it.' Who was?"

  "I told you. Larry and Paul and I. And of course Dr. Crockwell."

  "Right." I waited. He looked at me and said nothing, his scent becoming Mellors-like again.

  "Paul and Larry were very, very angry," he said tightly. "Espe­cially Larry."

  "At Crockwell."

  He nodded.

  "So?"

  St. James started breathing hard. "I think—I think I could go to prison for this," he said.

  "You all got high and you did something to Crockwell?"

  He nodded.

  "Which was?"

  He said, "I—I can't tell you."

  "Why?"

  "We all swore we'd never tell."

  "Even Crockwell?"

  "Especially Crockwell. He said he'd never press charges if we all kept our mouths shut."

  "Jesus, did you rape him?"

  Now he grimaced. "God, no! What kind of people do you think we are?"

  "The kind that could go to prison for whatever you did do. You just said so, Steven."

  "Yes, but—no, I would never do a thing like that. And neither would Paul or Larry, even though they despised Crockwell. Espe­cially Larry."

  "Is Larry an old friend of yours?"

  "Not old, but good. We met in a bar in Albany when Paul and Larry were having some hard times on account of Paul's drinking. We slept together once in a while, especially after Larry moved out and had his own apartment. We turned on together occasion­ally, and one time we ran into Paul when he was drunk and he joined us. And that's when it happened. One Thursday night in January when they knew Crockwell would be alone in his office. They started talking about Crockwell, and they got angrier and angrier about what he does to gay people and what he did to them, and that's when Larry got this idea about how to get even."

  He sat there breathing hard again, the wet circles under his arms as big as grapefruits now. He started to speak several times, but each time nothing came out. For a minute, I thought he might faint.

  After another minute, I said, "Am I going to have to ask Crockwell what happened?"

  Still breathing erratically, St. James nodded. "You can ask him. But I don't think he'll tell you."

  "You realize, Steven, that there may be blackmail involved, and murder. You may be obstructing justice, a felony in itself."

  Looking bewildered again, he said, "You keep saying that, but I don't understand it at all. Who would blackmail any of us? The only people who know about the incident are me, Larry and Dr. Crockwell. Paul wouldn't have blackmailed Larry, I can't imagine. And he didn't try to blackmail me. And even if he had tried to blackmail Crockwell, Crockwell would have just said, 'Okay, tell the world. Then you'll go to prison for what you did.' So why would Paul do that?"

  "Maybe," I said, "Crockwell’s reputation was at stake, and that meant more than anything to him, and so Paul knew he was vulnerable."

  "That's possible," St. James said. "But Crockwell could have just said to Paul, 'Tell anybody you want. I'll just deny the whole thing. You're just a disgruntled former patient who went over the edge, and you're a drunken sexual pervert nobody will believe.' And anyway, Strachey, where did you get the idea that there are pictures? Nobody was taking pictures, I can tell you that for sure. I know, because I was there."

  St. James seemed to be breathing more evenly and sweating a little less now, though his dogs were slobbering up a storm. I felt like getting down on the floor and slobbering too. It seemed as though I had systematically eliminated all useful knowledge per­taining to Paul Haig's death and that I was nearly all the way back to my state of useless innocence of five days earlier.

  I said, "Steven, unless you can find it within yourself to be more forthcoming with me on exactly what happened in Crockwell's office that night, I do believe that I'll have no choice but to go to the Albany police and relay to them the admissions you have made to me here tonight."

  St. James's fist came down on the end table next to him, caus­ing the lamp on it to jump and the dogs to leap into the air and come down snarling. I left soon after.

  21

  Late Sunday night, back on Crow Street, barely un-bitten by dogs and still bordering on the desperate, I considered how the precious little I had left to go on was Vernon Crockwell himself. Vengeance had been done to him—"tortured" was one word St. James had used—and it was so awful (so humiliating?) that Crockwell didn't dare report the incident, even though it was a crime, an imprisonable offense.

  So Haig had tried to blackmail Crockwell? And Crockwell, whose reputation was everything to him, killed Haig? And tried to kill Bierly? And did that mean St. James was next? I'd forgotten to warn him. Though all that seemed less and less likely now any­way. Approached with a blackmail attempt, Crockwell probably would simply have told Haig to buzz off. And Bierly, of course, had been telling me all along that I was off base and on the wrong track connecting the St. James-Haig-Bierly-Crockwell incident to Haig's death, or even to any blackmail attempt at all. Yet Bierly did try to implicate Crockwell himself in Haig's death. That's what he had tried to hire me to prove.

  Timmy was asleep when I climbed into bed, and I wanted to chew it all over with him. But he needed his rest on account of working for a living, unlike me, so I lay for some hours going over it in my mind and awaiting a blinding insight. But by three a.m. , the last time I checked the clock, the only thing I had pro­duced was some drool on the pillow.

  Monday morning, first thing, I called Crockwell's machine—I had nowhere else to turn until after I met with Paul Haig's Ballston

  Spa psychiatrist that evening—and left this message: "Hi, Ver­non, Don Strachey here. I know about your evening with Bierly and Haig and Steven St. James in January. You have my sympa­thy, but we do need to talk. You talk to me, or I talk to Al Finnerty. Take your choice. Call me."

  Timmy, just out of the shower, said, 'You were a little bit abrupt with Group Commander Crockwell. What was that about?"

  I described my evening wit
h Steven St. James and its tantaliz­ing, incomplete revelations.

  Timmy said, "I wonder what they did to him. Do you think they could have raped him or something? That's what it sounds like."

  "St. James says no, they'd never do a vicious thing like that. Anyway, rapists tend to have histories of being violent, and none of these guys do, that I know of."

  "I'll bet it had something to do with their being gay, though, and the psychotherapy group. Let the punishment fit the crime."

  "Whatever it is, Crockwell is apparently so determined to keep it from coming out that he'll risk being charged with Bierly's shooting, or even Paul Haig's murder."

  "You're not still planning on ruining Crockwell, are you? Even if he wasn't mixed up in Haig's death or Bierly's shooting? It does sound as if he may have suffered enough."

  "Suffered, yes, but he's still operating his rotten, destructive business. Anyway, no. I'm beginning to suspect that there may be ways other than ruination to remove Vernon T. Crockwell as a social menace."

  "Just to be on the safe side, maybe you'd better run those ideas by me first."

  He ambled by me, naked, en route to his outfit-of-the-day, nicely laid out the night before across his personal ironing board.

  "Maybe I will run my ideas by you, or maybe I'll just run them up your leg. Like this."

  He hated being late for work, but once in a while he made an exception. He hopped off the bed half an hour later, reshowered, and sped off to the office of Assemblyman Myron R. Lipshutz

  (D-New York City), for whom Timmy was chief legislative aide. And I drifted off and slept till one. It was lucky I woke up then, for I had slept through a call from Vernon Crockwell. His mes­sage on my machine said he could see me at three in his office, and I called his machine immediately to confirm the appoint­ment.

  "I hope you're not going to mention this perfectly idiotic black­mail business to the police, Donald. It will just fuel their mis­guided suspicions that I was involved in Larry Bierly's shooting or even Paul Haig's death. My attorney has managed to convince the district attorney that the evidence against me is entirely circum­stantial and it's obvious that someone who doesn't care for me or my principles is attempting to frame me. But the blackmail idea will only get the police stirred up again, and that would be to the advantage of no one except the vicious deviant who is behind all of this."

  "But Vernon," I said, "what we've finally come up with is a powerful and entirely plausible motive for Paul Haig's murder. Blackmail makes sense. And Paul's mother says he admitted to her—rubbed her nose in it, actually—that that's what he was attempting just before he died: the blackmail of somebody with enough money to pull Paul back from the brink of bankruptcy."

  Crockwell sniffed. He was seated across his desk from me before his framed certificates in normalcy studies and his library of sexual normaliana. Both his hands were up within sight, a sign maybe that I had earned a degree of trust.

  He said, "But I was not the person Paul was blackmailing. I repeat, I was not the person Paul was blackmailing. Once again: I was not the person Paul was blackmailing. Can you grasp what I am saying, Donald?"

  "Yes, Vernon, but the question remains, Were you the person Paul was blackmailing?"

  He wasn't used to this, it was obvious. One hand went back down behind his desk, and I doubted he was reaching for his checkbook. He said, "Donald, you obviously have nothing to

  offer me in this matter, or to the cause of truth. I agreed to see you today only because you claim to have some information about me that you seem to think I may consider embarrassing. I sup­pose you think you're blackmailing me. Perhaps that's it—per­haps you are involved in some type of odious blackmail scheme."

  "That's a whole new slant, Vernon. Maybe it's me I should be sniffing around. You're a genius."

  "Well, you'll not blackmail me."

  "What was it like?" I said gravely, and watched him.

  He reddened and looked away. After a moment, he said, "Well, what do you think it was like, Donald?"

  "They did it right here in your own office?"

  "Of course. The equipment is here."

  And I thought, Oh, the equipment, yes, the equipment. I said, "It was a Thursday night, right, Vernon? So Paul and Larry both knew you would be here alone."

  "Yes." He was unable to look at me.

  Now the question was, Who or what had they tried to turn him on to? I said, "Did they bring their own—what? Photos? Slides?"

  He glanced at me quickly and seemed to relax a degree or two, as if I had missed something critical and especially humiliating. He said, "Steven St. James provided the slides."

  Of course. Mellors. I remembered a visit Timmy and I had made to the Hudson Valley Game Farm several years earlier with Timmy's sister and her children. Recollections of the petting zoo came flooding back.

  I said, "What were the the pictures of? Sheep?"

  Crockwell shuddered violently once, then gave me a despair­ing little nod.

  "They tied you up? Gagged you?"

  "Yes," he squeaked.

  "They wired you into your own setup—where is it, down the hall, behind those closed doors?"

  "Yes."

  "They wired you into your own Frankenstein's lab setup for zapping the bejesus out of men when they respond sexually to

  other men, and they—what? Zapped you when slides of Playboy bunnies came on and then they shut off the juice when slides of sheep came on?"

  Now he looked up at me desperately. "Female sheep," he bleated.

  "Well, sure. They knew you weren't a pervert."

  "No. No, the whole thing could have been worse." At this, he quickly looked away, and I began to wonder.

  I said, "It was a brutal thing for them to have done to you, Vernon. Whatever foul deeds you may have committed against gay men in that room over the years, none of it was as vicious as what was done to you by Bierly, Haig, and St. James on that night last January."

  "No, no. You can't even begin to understand what it was like, Donald."

  "But were you . . . ? You know."

  "Was I what?"

  "Weren't you turned on, Vernon, just a little?"

  "Of course not!" he snapped.

  "My God, Vernon," I said, "do you mean to tell me that your system doesn't work? That in fact you can't change a man's sexual orientation with dirty pictures and electrodes and lightning storms? Wait till this gets out."

  "Don't be absurd. Sexual reparative therapy using aversion techniques requires dozens of hours over a long period of time to achieve lasting results. Moreover, having intercourse with a sheep is not a natural human desire."

  "I've heard from friends who grew up on farms that it can be quite pleasant, though."

  Being a town boy, I guessed, Crockwell just glared.

  I said, "Why didn't you call the police? After they left, I mean. How long did this go on, anyway?"

  "From 10:40 p.m. until 1:45 a.m. It was endless, endless."

  "I'm sure it was, Vernon. You must have been both mortified and terrified. What was done to you was a felonious criminal assault. So, why didn't you have the three of them prosecuted?"

  He glowered and even shook a little. "Can you imagine the— the television coverage of such a trial?"

  "Yes, I can."

  "I would have been a laughingstock. My patients would have—lost confidence in me."

  "It's like the old joke," I said. "A man running for sheriff in Texas wants to spread the rumor that his opponent fucks pigs. A campaign worker says, 'Why do that? It's not true.' 'No, it isn't,' the candidate says, 'but let's make him deny it.' Just being men­tioned in a conversation about bestiality is bad for business, and being mentioned in this regard every night at six and eleven between the killer-mom stories and the Lotto drawing would pretty much end a man's professional usefulness in Albany, I would guess. I can understand your reticence, Vernon—al­though I'm not sure I would have been so forbearing in the matter myself. In fact, I'd have been left
with feelings that were downright murderous."

  He said, "Of course you would. I had such feelings too. I'm only human."

  "But you didn't act on those feelings, Vernon?"

  "No, Donald," he said. "I am not a murderer." He looked me in the eye when he said it, and he looked to me as if he either was telling the truth or was a total psychopath.

  "You say Haig never tried to blackmail you. What would you have done, Vernon, if he had? What if Paul had come to you and said, 'Pay me sixty thousand dollars or I'll spread pictures around of you involved in what will look to a lot of people like some kind of ritual involving sadomasochistic bestiality'?"

  "I'd have told him to take his sordid business elsewhere. First, there are no pictures. No one had a camera that night. Second, if Paul had spread the story of the incident, I would simply have denied it."

  "That would have damaged your campaign for sheriff, Ver­non."

  "I wasn't running for sheriff, Donald. I'm a respected psycho-

  therapist and Paul Haig was an alcoholic and a sexual deviant. In any case, I can't imagine Paul Haig attempting to blackmail me by threatening to make public an incident in which his—not mine but his—involvement was criminal."

  I kept being reminded of that. I said, "You've got a point, Vernon. But Paul Haig was blackmailing someone, and then he was killed. The probability is high that the relationship between the two events is cause-and-effect."

  "This may be true, but I think you need to look into Paul's life of depravity for your answers, not my life of professional integrity and Christian probity."

  What a pill. I said, "How come for a while you were desperate to hire me, Vernon, to get you off the hook with the cops, and then you changed your mind?"

  He blushed again. "I was acting irrationally for a period of time. I was too emotional." He blushed some more.

  I said, "You were trying to buy me off. You knew Bierly was trying to sic me on you, and you knew I detested the savage things you were doing to men in your crackpot practice. So you thought that for money I could be turned into your ally instead of your adversary. But then you saw that my aim was to dig out the truth at any cost on Paul's death and Larry's shooting, and I wasn't going to care what I dredged up in the process—your going into training for sheep fucking and whatnot—and you decided you had better take your chances with mere legal representation and Norris Jackacky's chummy relations with the DA, and I could take a hike. Am I right?"