discomfort; maybe he'd hated high school, or maybe the photographer had just said, 'C'mon, son, smile like your girl friend just said she was ready to go all the way,' or maybe his shirt collar was too tight. High-school photos were always hard to read. The police detectives in the other photo looked grave, and one was pointing at a doorknob.
No mention was made in either the caption or the story of the significance of this gesture. I made a note to 'ck sig drnb.' It was possible the doorknob was simply thought by someone to have been vaguely photogenic and redolent of criminal activity.
Steven Kleckner, aged twenty-four, the main story said, had been discovered stabbed to death in his bed at 7:35 the previous morning by Albany police. The department had received an anonymous call from a man who'd said only: 'He's dead-I think Steve is dead,' and given the address. Police had been admitted to the basement apartment on lower Hudson Avenue by the landlady, who lived on the first floor of the rundown brick building, one of the few in the neighborhood that hadn't yet been urban-renewed.
A long kitchen knife, its blade blood-soaked, had been found on the floor beside the bed on which the victim lay. There was no sign of a struggle having taken place or of forced entry into the 'inexpensively furnished apartment.'
Kleckner was identified as a disc jockey at Trucky's Disco on Western Avenue who had come originally from the village of Alps in Rensselaer County. He had lived in Albany for six years and was 'a bachelor.' The article did not mention that Trucky's was a gay student hangout near the main SUNY campus and that Kleckner was well known and well liked among the regulars there. Twenty years earlier the headline would have been YOUTH SLAIN IN HOMO
LOVENEST, but discretion to the point of uninformativeness had set in at the Hearst papers. Or maybe it was just indifference.
The article did reveal that Kleckner, who had not worked at Trucky's on the fatal early morning but had spent most of the night there dancing and drinking with friends, was last seen leaving the bar around three A.M. 'with a male companion.'
A small sidebar contained remarks from people who knew
Kleckner back in Alps. His basketball coach said Kleckner was 'a nice kid, polite, and kind of shy' who 'didn't fool with drugs and didn't date much.' The manager of a Glass Lake super-market where Kleckner once bagged groceries called him 'sort of bashful' but 'reliable and well brought up.' Kleckner's older sister, Mrs. Damon Roach, of Dunham Hollow, spoke for the family: 'He was just a mixed-up kid, and he didn't deserve a thing like this. It's too late for Steven, but maybe other boys will learn a lesson from it.'
A day later, on Monday, October first, the Times Union said police had identified the 'male companion' as William Blount, of Madison Avenue, 'son of a prominent Albany financier,' and were seeking his whereabouts so that he could be questioned. The same article said the medical examiner had estimated the time of Steven Kleckner's death as five-thirty A.M. and had 'stated his belief the victim died instantaneously from a single puncture wound to his heart.' Also, for the first time, word was out: traces of semen had been found in Kleckner's rectum. No forthright speculation was offered on how the substance had found its way there, but Billy Blount, the murder suspect, was now identified as a 'one-time gay activist' who had been chairman of the Albany-Schenectady-Troy Gay Alliance Political Action Committee in the early 1970s.
Follow-up stories over the next four days offered no new hard news, except that the DA's office now considered the evidence against Blount to be 'conclusive,' and a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Blount was being charged with second-degree murder.
The Times Union had not editorialized on the crime; moral inferences, for what they'd be worth, would have to wait. The paper did print a letter to the editor from Hardy Monkman, president of the Gay League Against Unfairness in the Media, taking the paper to task for its 'insulting reference to a gay citizen's body' and including a 'demand for equal time.' Whatever that meant.
The gay movement still had strength in Albany, but occasionally one of its leaders came forth with a public utterance espousing a notion and couched in terms of such sublime daffiness that gay men and women up and down the Hudson Valley cringed with embarrassment or, as might have been the case with Billy Blount, said the hell with it and dropped out.
I slipped the clippings into a file folder which I marked Blount/Kleckner, then called Albany PD and learned that the detective handling the Kleckner murder was out of his office and wouldn't return until Monday.
I drove out Central to the Colonie Center shopping mall. At Macy's I picked out a black lamb's wool sweater and slipped it on under my jacket. I wrote out a check for forty dollars, signed it in a bold hand, and laid it on the counter in front of the bored clerk. He glanced at the check as if he'd seen one before, and then he glanced at me as if he'd seen one before. He looked familiar. I said, 'Kevin-Elk Street?'
'My name is Kevin, but I live in Delmar. I don't believe we've met. No-no, I'm sure we haven't.'
Like hell. 'Sorry,' I said. 'I had you mixed up with a guy I once knew who'd drawn little valentines all over his buttocks with a ball-point pen. Inside the valentines were the initials of all the men who had visited there. It must have been another Kevin. Sorry. Funny story, though, isn't it?'
'H-yeah, ha ha.'
The Music Barn record shop was along the main arcade of the shopping center, across from a long brick- and-blond-wood fountain that tinkled and hissed like an old toilet tank. Bernini in the suburbs. I spoke with the Music Barn clerk and was directed to the back of the store, where I found the manager opening up a carton of Donna Summer 'On The Radio' LPs.
'She is that,' I said.
'Who? Beg your pardon?'
'On the radio-Donna. Driving out here, I dialed around and picked her up on three stations.
'Dim All the Lights' once and 'No More Tears' twice. My own favorites, though, are 'Bad Girls,'
'Hot Stuff,' and 'Wasted.' Donna always cheers me up.'
'She's okay, I guess, but she sure as heck isn't Patti Page.' This was said with a straight face, no irony intended. He was losing his hair and looked to be a little older than I was, forty, and I guessed he'd had his good times twenty years ago and wasn't living his life backwards.
'I'm Donald Strachey and I'm a private detective.' I showed him the photostat of my license.
'Billy Blount's parents want to help him, and they've hired me to locate him.'
He felt around inside his beige V-neck sweater, brought out a pair of glasses with pink plastic rims, and studied the laminated card. 'No kidding, a real private eye! Jeez. I'm Elvin John, pleased to meet you,' he said and offered his hand. I wanted to say, Hi, Elvin, I'm Nick Jagger, but I supposed he'd heard it before. His moon face and blinky blue eyes showed confusion.
'Billy's parents are helping the police capture him? Golly, I sure don't understand that.'
I wasn't certain I did either, but I said, 'They think it's best that he turn himself in and then let a good lawyer handle it. They're probably right. Billy can't have much of a life as a fugitive.'
'They don't think Billy actually killed that guy, do they?'
'Well-no. I take it you don't either.'
Elvin John set down the stack of records and shook his head. 'Nope, I don't. Billy's a messed-up guy, I suppose you could say, and he was kind of mad at the world. But actually kill somebody?
I'm no expert, but-holy cow, no. I don't believe it'
'You said Billy's messed up. How so,'
He gestured, and I followed him. We went into an alcove, where John slid onto a metal stool, retrieved a cigar from behind a carton of plastic bags, and unwrapped it. 'When I say messed up, I don't mean what you think I mean.' He gave me a knowing look and fired up the cigar, which definitely was not Cuban, though still possibly communistic. Albanian, maybe. 'I don't know how broad-minded you are,' John said, 'but I'm tolerant of minorities myself, and I wasn't talking about Billy being a homo or anything like that.' He said it with a trace of smugness, a challenge to my liberal sensibilities.
I said, 'Good, I'm gay myself.'
His pale eyebrows shot up. 'Oh yeah? Jeez, you don't look it!'
'Well, you don't look Jewish either.'
'I'm not. I'm Lutheran.'
'Well then, you don't look Lutheran. You look-Methodist.'
