"No. I'll deal with those."
This got Timmy's attention again. "What do you mean?"
"I'll use the files. There's no reason for the police to have to go into them if I'm covering that end of the investigation." He gave me a look. "The files are obviously the key to finding John's killer or killers. And since it's important that they not fall into the hands of a government agency that might misuse them-as police agencies almost inevitably will-then I'll just have to take possession of the files and use them to find the killer and turn him-or them-over to the police with enough evidence to convict."
"Will you do that?" Sandifer said, looking a little brighter. "God, that would be great."
"Don-" Timmy said, and then realizing he could not say what he wanted to say in front of Sandifer, he waved it away.
"I don't have any choice," I said, "as far as I can see. It's either turn the files over to the cops, which is out of the question, or use them as an investigative tool at least as effectively as the police would. What else can I do?"
"Maybe you should just turn them over," Timmy said uneasily. "It's the Handbag police who'd be looking at them, not the much more dangerous Albany cops. Anyway, anybody who's in those files must have done so many disgusting things that the police already have them on their lists of the region's most outrageous perverts."
"I can't believe you said that."
"Well, you know what I mean."
Sandifer said, "They do tend to be the biggest whores. Most of those people didn't get into the files without being real scuzzballs."
"Scuzzballs deserve their privacy too," I said, "the Burger Court's loony Five Stooges 1986 opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Anyway, I happen to have read through those files this morning, and I can tell you that most of the people in there are simply gay men and women who live Ozzie-and-Harriet lives with their significant others, more or less, and a few of whom have strayed once in a while and their indiscretions happen to have been picked up and noted by some of John Rutka's informants. Should that information become official police information?"
"No," Timmy said, "of course not." He had on a distant thoughtful look, as if this were an interesting theoretical question concerning the abstract gay masses.
"John would be grateful," Sandifer said, and began to grow teary again. "He's always sort of expected to be disappointed in the people he's counted on. It was years before he even trusted me totally. It would have mattered a lot that you stuck by him, Strachey."
Timmy sat there with a quizzical look, as if unsure how I had managed to end up taking on work that would help serve as a memorial to a man Timmy had considered rotten to the core and whom I hadn't been too crazy about either. Whatever my degree of responsibility or lack of it in John Rutka's death-I didn't have the will or the energy to think about that quite yet-I was still obliged to stay on the case for one very good reason: as soon as I found the killer I could burn the loathsome files.
I said, "We'd better haul the files out of here and over to Crow Street, where I can lock them up." Timmy winced. "Eddie, maybe you'd better come too. You're probably in no danger, but you'll be able to feel secure in our spare room, and anyway I might need you to answer some questions about the files."
"Yeah, okay. I don't want to stay here alone tonight. I don't want to sleep alone in that room."
In the teenaged girl's bedroom on the second floor, Sandifer reached into the hippo's belly for the attic keys. He groped around, then shook the animal, vigorously, and then frantically.
"The keys aren't here."
We tore out to the attic door, which hung open. The keys dangled in the upper of the two locks. The light was on in the airless attic but the fan was off, as if someone had been there briefly and then left in a hurry. The desk and file cabinet appeared undisturbed, except that the top file drawer had been pulled out. It did not have a ransacked look, however. I said, "I suppose there's no way to tell if a file has been removed, or is there?"
"The index," Sandifer said, and opened the top drawer of the desk. He removed a bundle of papers clipped together and said,
"We'll have to go through both drawers and check the files against the list. Do you think whoever took John made him open the files first and took his own out?"
"His or theirs. That's what it looks like."
"Jesus. Then all we have to do to find out who did it is to see whose file is missing."
"Maybe. Though a killer who's playing with a full deck would have thought of the possibility of an index to the files and would have taken them all. Or he'd have taken someone else's file to aim the investigation in the wrong direction."
"Maybe he's not that smart," Sandifer said, and I hoped he was right. Although it was soon apparent that whether the pilferer of the files was brilliant or stupid hardly mattered at all. end user
12
There's no name on this entry," Timmy said. "It just says 'A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite.' "
"Who's that?" I asked Sandifer. "What does he mean by 'A for-whatever-it-is Mega-Hypocrite?"
" 'A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite,'" Timmy said again.
Sandifer looked baffled. "I don't know. I have no idea."
"All the other names in the index are spelled out," Timmy said. "Mega-Hypocrite is the only one that's coded like that."
We were back in Albany and had the file cabinet in the spare room in the second-floor rear of our house on Crow Street. The top drawer was open and I was checking the actual files against the index Timmy was reading from. The first name on the "A" page had been "Anderson, Cliff," and the file had been in the front of the drawer where it should have been. But when I looked for the second folder, for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite, it was not in the drawer.
"All-American Mega-Hypocrite is missing. Or maybe it's misfiled."
"I would doubt it," Sandifer said. "There were some things John could be careless about, but not recordkeeping. He was meticulous."
I searched through the files, in case Mega-Hypocrite had slid down or been uncharacteristically misplaced somehow.
"How would anybody stealing the file know that All-American Mega-Hypocrite was his designation?" Timmy said. "Eddie doesn't even know what it meant."
"Dunno. He might have forced Rutka to tell him which one was his file. We can assume he didn't know about the index in the desk drawer or he would have taken it. Or, he might have checked the files for a folder under his own name and, when he didn't find one, started a random search. He'd have come to the All-American Mega-Hypocrite file right away, maybe seen that the shoe fit, and verified it by going through the actual contents of the file."
I kept flipping through the folders, eyes peeled for Mega-Hypocrite. I asked Sandifer if there were any of the outees or soon-to-be-outees Rutka considered to be especially repugnantly hypocritical. "Bruno Slinger maybe?"
"He considered them all sickeningly hypocritical," Sandifer said. "The worst one was always the one he was going after during whatever week it was."
Rutka's column in the next planned Queerscreed, galleys of which we had carried off from his desktop, outed an independently wealthy ACLU booster, not much of a candidate for Mega-Hypocrite.
Timmy said, "If they weren't for the cause, they were against it, eh?" He was gripping the index sheaf tightly, and I was glad it wasn't a club.
"Sort of," Sandifer said. "I guess you could put it that way."
"Righteous John Rutka and the unrighteous multitudes."
"Timothy," I said, reminding him with a look that it was all moot now.
"Actually," Sandifer said, "there was this one person, I know, who John had been working on for a long time trying to get the goods on. He knew the guy was gay but he didn't have the proof, or enough proof. He never told me who it was because he said I'd never believe it."
"Why wouldn't you have believed it? Didn't you trust John?"
Sandifer flushed and gave a quick embarrassed shrug. "John was sometimes loose with some of his
facts."
"Even with you?"
"He just couldn't help it. I realized this about him not long after we met. But it was just the way he was and I got used to it. He mostly just made things up about himself, not other people. I don't think he was ever dishonest in his work. He would never say it, but I think he knew he'd been able to maintain his professional integrity and he was proud of that. And he was always careful in his outing columns to get his facts right."
"What else did he tell you about this special case? Could this be our Mr. A-for-All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite?"
"I can't remember. I don't think he said anything else about the guy. The only reason I remember at all," Sandifer said, "is because John got a kind of funny, intense look when he mentioned it. I can remember the day. We were in the car driving up the street in Handbag and he told me about this guy he said he was really going to fix, and he had this look on his face I'd never seen before. I can still see him."
"Describe the look."
"Just weird, intense. And I think he might have been blushing a little. Or maybe just angry. I don't know what it was."
"Mega-Hypocrite is nowhere in the top drawer," I said. I started through the bottom drawer.
Timmy had been flipping idly through the index sheets, perusing the names, and clucking in mild disgust.
"What!"
He'd been perched on the edge of the guest room bed and suddenly he rose straight up like a Looney Tunes character. He went into a swivet, hit the ceiling, went through the roof. "Did you see this?"
"What's that?"
"I'm in here! My name is in the index!"
"Now do you agree it's better that I deal with the files and they don't fall into the hands of the police?"
"Let me see the file. Look in the C’s."
"I didn't know," Sandifer said. "Jeez, I'm really sorry."
I handed Timmy the folder with his name on it and said, "This is a pretty slender dossier for a pervert as outrageous as yourself."
He read it. "This is disgusting. It's from a hotel employee who says- Oh, crime-en-ee."
I kept on flipping through the bottom drawer searching for Mega-Hypocrite.
"Have you seen this?" he said, moaning.
"I have."
"That liar."
"It's always risky placing your trust in economists."
"He told me he'd never done it before with a North American."
"And did the earth move?"
"I guess you two have a pretty open relationship," Sandifer said. "John and I did for a while, but everything started to come apart, so we went back to monogamy."
"Our rules are variable," I said. "Well, no, that's not quite it."
Timmy snapped, "He means it's not the rules that are variable, it's the observance of them. Recently, only by me. I made a mistake once in fourteen years. And look at this putrid bilge! I would not feel any more violated and demeaned if I discovered this garbage in the files of the F.B.I. In fact, this is worse. I can't believe that gay people are doing this to other gay people. This is not a blow against the old-fashioned fear and self-loathing that made gay people miserable through the supposedly recently ended dark ages-it's just a kind of bizarre extension of it."
Sandifer was sitting in a chair with his head in his hands and saying nothing. Timmy looked over at him and said, "I guess I've made my point. I'll shut up. You don't need to be listening to this now."
"It's okay," Sandifer said dolefully. "It doesn't matter what anybody says anymore."
I said, "There's no Mega-Hypocrite file in here. Assuming that such a file actually existed, somebody seems to have taken pains to excise it."
Timmy shoved the "T. Callahan" file back my way as if it were soiling his hands and said, "Why wouldn't it have existed?"
"Rutka could have planned a file by that name, then changed his mind and used the hypocrite's real name instead. A name on one of the other files might be the real Mega-Hypocrite."
"So maybe one of the other files is missing. We haven't checked that."
"Let's do it."
It took two and a half minutes for Timmy to read off each of the 311 names in the index. A file was located for each name. The files were flawlessly arranged in alphabetical order. Still, the only file missing was the one called "A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite."
Sandifer suddenly looked alert. He said, "Maybe the books would help."
We looked at him. "Books?"
"John kept financial records for the whole outing campaign in Cityscape and Queerscreed. Sometimes he paid people for information. That's not the ideal way to go about it, I know, but John always believed that ethically these things evened themselves out over the long run."
"Where are these financial records?"
"In my bag. I brought them. I didn't think I should leave them alone in the house."
"Where's the bag?"
"In the hall." He went out and came back immediately carrying a big beat-up red shoulder bag stuffed with belongings. He unzipped it, reached in and groped around, and came up with a bookkeeper's bound entry book.
"How is this going to help?" Timmy said.
"Maybe it won't. But if Rutka had informants who dished up dirt that was so critical to the cause that Rutka was willing to lay out cash for it, maybe one of those people can figure out-or will know-who the Mega-Hypocrite is."
I scanned the ledger. Rutka seemed to have had just one source of income, the family hardware store. "HDW" brought in from three thousand to four thousand dollars each month. I asked Sandifer if Rutka had owned half the store.
"Forty-nine percent. Ann owns fifty-one. That's the way it was left to them by their father."
"John didn't resent the difference?"
"He was interested in the income, not the control. Ann runs the store for a good salary and does a good job. And the two of them got along in their way. They were different but they never got in each other's way. John lived his life and Ann lived hers."
The disbursements included household expenses- utilities, taxes, locksmith-along with occasional "personal" disbursements, and larger ones for "office and printing." Most of the payments in the latter category were made to Kopy-King. There was no category called "informants" or "spies" or "dish."
There were, however, payments to three entries listed apparently by their initials: NZ, DR, and JG. I'd never seen NZ or DR before, but JG I had. I got out Ronnie Linkletter's file and there it was: the handwritten sheet Rutka had left that said "From JG Linkletter at motel with A." Then two long rows of dates. I checked the calendar and saw that they were all Wednesdays, starting the previous July and running into mid-June.
I asked Sandifer if he knew what these initials meant. He puzzled over them and finally said no. The "A" might have meant Asshole Mega-Hypocrite, but the other initials, if that's what they were, remained indecipherable.
I read aloud the payments to NZ: $320 in December; $435 in January; $310 in February; similar amounts through July. JG received even higher amounts from October through July, totaling nearly $6,000. DR was the big money-maker. He-or she, or it
— was paid an even $ 1,400 per month from the previous September right up through July. According to a notation in the margin, all these payments had been made "in cash."
I asked Sandifer, "Were you ever with John when he met his regular informants? It looks as if that's what these entries refer to.
He could have received information from them over the phone, but he must have met them once a month to hand over the cash payments for their diligent research. People in their right minds don't send cash amounts larger than a dime through the mail these days."
"No, I never did. John would just say he had to go talk to somebody. Or he had a meeting with somebody. He wanted to keep me out of that part of it. To protect me, was what he said."
"Protect you from what? You were out in the streets hustling Queerscreed. Wasn't that where the greatest physical risk was?"
"I guess so. I'm not sure w
hat he meant by that- protecting me. I guess he thought some of the people he was after and some of the people they were mixed up with were dangerous. And he was right," Sandifer added with eyes glistening. "John knew somehow that some of them were very dangerous people."
I could no longer argue with that. end user
13
The three of us were in the kitchen the next morning at seven.
"I'll make a few calls while Timmy goes through his Donna Reed routine," I told Sandifer.
"Who's that?"
"She was one of the great chefs of the middle part of the century," Timmy said. "Would you like some eggs? That's what Donald eats."
"Sure."
"He used to drink them, blended with orange juice, but now they've all got salmonella and cleaning up the chicken industry would be communistic. Not that the Communists ever cleaned up theirs."
"I'd like mine fried on both sides with nothing runny anywhere."
"That's a good precaution to take."
I dragged the phone into the cubbyhole under the front stairs, shut the door, and phoned Bub Bailey. He was in his office early, as I expected he might be.
"I gave John Rutka your advice, Chief, but he didn't take it."
"No, I feel real bad for the boy. He had a hard life and he died in a way nobody should have to. It's a blessing Charlie and Doris are gone and don't have to see this."
"What do you mean, John had a hard life? I wouldn't have thought of it that way."
"I don't mean to say he was disadvantaged or he'd been abused. John was always just a big, odd, nice-looking kid who told tales and never fit in very well. His mom and dad never knew quite what to make of him. It was good when John went off to find himself in the city. I admired the boy for coming home when Charlie and Doris went into their decline, but after they died I could never figure out why John stayed on."
"Has the body been positively identified?"
"No, I should hear by noon, the M.E. says. I told him-I suggested he be extra certain on this one."
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