And then it happened. The Bergenfield police force began a series of raids on the Rat's Nest, arresting employees for serving liquor to minors, which may or may not have been the case, and busting patrons on dope, drunk and disorderly, and, in a few cases, consensual sodomy charges.
The crowds fled-most of them back to Trucky's, where the death by stabbing of a popular disc jockey caused a dampening of spirits and a jittery watchfulness, but no mass move to a less tainted nighttime hangout.
A couple of the Central Avenue bars, witnessing the unexpected popularity of the New Decadence, made gestures in that direction. One disco, teetering on the edge of extinction, changed its name from Mary-Mary's to the Bung Cellar and regained its wandering clientele overnight. Another bar was less successful. The owner of the Green Room attempted a 'Western' motif by hanging a child's cowboy hat on a wall sconce, but this was not enough.
We left the Terminal at ten and made our way up the avenue, hitting all the gay watering holes and discos except Myrna's, the lesbian bar-an oversight that turned out to be a mistake on my part. I'd been an investigator for nearly fifteen years: army intelligence; the Robert Morgart Agency; four years on my own. But I was still learning.
I talked to the doormen and bartenders in all the spots we hit, and while some said yes, they knew who Billy Blount was and had seen him around, none knew him except by name and none knew who his friends were. I did not speak with the disc jockeys-they were absorbed in their art, like marathon runners or poker players-but I collected their names and phone numbers so I could check them out later if no leads developed elsewhere.
We lost Phil and Calvin at the Bung Cellar, then headed out Western and hit Trucky's, the bar where the murdered DJ had worked, at two-fifteen, when the disco night was peaking. Debbie Jacob's 'Don't You Want My Love' was on when we went in. The place was jam-packed and smelled of beer, Brut, fresh sweat, cigarette smoke, and poppers. The dance area at Trucky's, in the back beyond a big oval bar, had flashing colored lights on the walls, on the ceiling, under the floor. It was as if Times Square of 1948 had been turned on its side and people were dancing on the neon signs. The music, pounding out of speakers the size of Mack truck engines, was sensuous and ripe, with its Latin rhythms and funky-bluesy yells and sighs, and the dancers moved like beautiful sexual swimmers in a fantastic sea.
Timmy and I made our way through the crowds along the walls, stopping to shout into the ears of people we knew, and danced for six or eight songs. We bought draughts then, and I made arrangements to talk to the bartenders after closing at four. Timmy headed back to the dance floor with an assistant professor of physics he knew from RPI, and I went looking for Mike Truckman.
The owner of Trucky's was not hard to spot. He'd been a famous football tackle at Siena College in the early fifties, and at six-three or — four and a mostly well distributed two-ten, he still cut a formidable figure in his pre- Calvin Klein white ducks and a bulky-knit black sweater that almost concealed the beginnings of a paunch.
I found Truckman in a corner uttering sweet nothings to and massaging the neck of a notorious hustler I'd seen on the streets but rarely in the bars. He was a smooth-skinned, athletic-looking young man with a smug, sleepy look and a green-and-white football jersey with the number 69 stenciled on it. Cute. I didn't feel bad about interrupting.
I'd met Truckman on several occasions, most recently at an early summer National Gay Task Force fund- raiser for which Truckman had donated the drinks, and he remembered me. I told him what I was doing. He stared hard at me for a few seconds, then slugged down a couple of ounces of whatever was in the glass he held and signaled for me to follow him.
We made our way past the disc jockey's glassed-in booth, turned, and went into an office with a thick metal door marked Private. I shut the door behind me. Truckman had been a bureaucrat with the New York Department of Motor Vehicles before he'd opened his bar two years before, and he'd brought his tastes, or habits, of office decor with him: gunmetal gray desk, filing cabinet to match, steel shelving along the wall. The bass notes from the speakers outside the door bumped and reverberated into the little room and made the metal shelves sing.
I said, 'I feel like I'm in the basement of the Reichschan-cellery. I hope you're not going to offer me a cyanide tablet.'
The crack was ill-timed, and Truckman did not laugh. He sat behind his desk, made further use of his half-full glass of what smelled like bourbon, and I hoisted myself onto a stack of Molson's crates.
'Whadda you wanna know?' Truckman said in a boozy-gravelly voice. I'm cooperating with everybody on this thing, but I don't know what the hell else I can tell you. Christ, this fucking thing is just dragging on and on. Christ, I dunno. What am I sposed to do? Christ, I dunno. It's just a tragedy, that's what it is, just a fucking terrible, terrible tragedy.'
He was drunk, and it had changed his personality from the one I knew. I remembered Truckman as a serious man, and sometimes agitated, but never morose and confused. I doubted that he'd made a habit of this. People who ran successful bars stayed sober. He brought a dirty white handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped the sweat from his forehead and neck. He had a big, craggy face with a wide, expressive mouth and would have been matinee-idol handsome if it hadn't been for his eyes, which were cold gray and ringed with puffs of ashen flesh.
I said, 'I'm sorry, Mike. I'm sure this is rough. Were you and Steve Kleckner close?'
'Whaddya mean, 'close'?' A sour, indignant look. 'Sure, we were close, that's no secret. Christ, Steve looked up to me, you know? What I'm saying is, Steve respected me for how I was so up front about being gay and how I always did so much for the movement-one hell of a lot more than the other bar owners did, the assholes. Steve thought I had-Christ, you know principles.'
He grimaced. A rick of milkweed-color hair stuck out over one ear, and I wanted to pass him my comb.
I said, 'I didn't know Steve. What was he like?'
He squeezed his eyes shut with his free hand. 'A nice kid,' Truckman said, shaking his head.
'Oh, such a nice sweet kid Steve was. But-naive. God, was that kid naive! Steve was naive, but he was learning, though, right? Steve was young, but he was catching on. We all have ideals, right? But you've gotta be tough in the way you go about it. A means to an end, right?'
He was beginning to slur his words. I said, 'Right.'
More bourbon.
I said, 'Mike, you're drunk.'
He shook his head. 'Nah, I'm drinking but I'm not drunk. Anyways, Floyd's out there, the doorman. Floyd can run the place if I feel like taking a drink. Floyd can do it, right?'
I nodded. I asked him why anyone would want to hurt Steve Kleckner.
He rolled his eyes at some imaginary companion off to my right. 'Christ, how would I know the answer to that? You'll have to ask the sonovabitch who did it, right? If the goddamn cops ever catch up with the little shit.'
'You mean Billy Blount?'
'Hey, the Blount guy did it, dinnee? I thought everybody knew that- the kid Steve left with here that night. With here. Here with.'
'Did you know Blount?'
'Nah, but I saw it happen-saw Steve and that little shit turn on to each other. I mean, don't get me wrong, right? I was glad to see it, honest to Christ, I was. I was glad to see Steve being so up for a change. Christ, moping around here the way he was, I just wanted to pick Steve up and shake him.'
'How come he'd been down?'
Truckman emptied his glass and brought a new bottle of Jim Beam from his desk drawer. He kicked the drawer shut and filled his glass as well as a second one. He said, 'Join me.'
'I've got a stein of your fifty-cent horse piss outside. Thanks, I'll stick with that. Why had Steve been depressed?'
'Dunno. Maybe his rose-colored glasses fell off.' He drank.
For an instant I wondered if Kleckner had actually worn rose-colored glasses, like Gloria Steinem's. It wouldn't have been unprecedented at Trucky's.
I said, 'Had he talked about it?'
'Nope, unh-unh.' He poured the drink for me that I'd declined.
'Had you ever seen Steve with Blount before?'
'Not that I remember. The cops asked me that. Fucking cops.'
