looking, but I'd read some of Greco's verses and he, unhappily, was no Auden, so maybe that explained it.
'Hi,' he said, smiling easily despite McWhirter's sarcastic, and possibly accurate, introduction.
'You're a gay detective? I don't think I've ever met one before.'
'Of course you have,' McWhirter put in emphatically. 'You just didn't know they were gay.
That's the whole point.'
'I'm Don Strachey,' I said, offering my hand. There was a brief tussle of fingers and thumbs while we found the old movement handclasp of the '60s. 'I am a private investigator, yes, and more or less coincidentally gay, and it's also true that I'm being paid by Millpond. But I'll be working for Dot, if she's agreeable. I'd have done that anyway.'
'Why don't you come in and talk to her?' Greco said, cheerfully accepting me at my word. Was he an instant judge of good character, or a dangerously vulnerable naif? 'Dot won't admit it,' he said, 'but she's really pretty upset, and she can use all the help and support she can get right now. And Edith's not making things any easier.'
I thought at first that 'Edith' might be a pet name for McWhirter, but then I remembered.
I said, 'Fine, I'd like to talk with Dot. When did you two arrive? Were you here last night when it happened?'
'No, we just got into town this morning, but we were here when the letter arrived. It really shook poor old Edith up. At first Dot wasn't even going to show it to her.'
'What letter was that? Trefusis didn't mention a letter.'
McWhirter snapped, 'Why should he? He wrote it, didn't he? Or his Mafia goons did. Or maybe you wrote it yourself, Strachey. I've heard all about this Trefusis gangster, and I wouldn't trust anybody who had anything to do with him.'
Greco and I went on with our exchange of information while McWhirter stood there adding to the humidity. 'It was in the mailbox when Dot went out around three this afternoon,' Greco said.
'Dot called the police right away, and they said they'd send a detective out, but he hasn't shown up yet. It's just a plain piece of notebook paper with printing that says, 'You're next. You got three days. Saturday you die.' It was addressed to both Edith and Dot.'
I said, 'Today's Friday. The letter arrived in the regular mail?'
Greco nodded. 'It was postmarked Wednesday in Albany. Whoever sent it must have thought it would be delivered the next day.'
'Could be,' I said. 'Somebody who doesn't patronize the Postal Service regularly and doesn't know how slow it can be. Or someone who can't add, or use a calendar.'
'I am going to demand,' McWhirter said, eyes flashing, 'that the police provide round-the-clock protection for Dot and Edith. And if those assholes aren't out here within half an hour, I am notifying the media and driving straight in to city hall and the mayor's office. It's been two fucking hours since Dot called them!'
'Ask nicely and the Albany cops might be helpful,' I said. 'Demand anything of them and they'll vanish without a trace. Or worse. They're a sensitive lot.' McWhirter glowered. 'As for the mayor,' I went on, enjoying myself a little, 'I'm fairly certain it's already past his bedtime. Not that he's all that alert and responsive during his waking hours. I'm not saying, Fenton, that 11 municipal government in Albany functions exactly the same way it does in, say, Buenos Aires.
It's more benign here-slower and sleepier than in the tropics. But don't get your hopes up. To a very large extent, if you're gay in Albany you're on your own. I'm a little surprised at your expectations. Surely you must have run onto similar situations elsewhere.'
McWhirter scowled at me with disgust, as if I were a prince of the local machine instead of one of its taxpaying reluctant benefactors. 'And people like you just sit around and take it,' he said acidly, then abruptly picked up his ladder and stalked off muttering.
Greco frowned after him for a moment, then shrugged and smiled, his most natural expression. I thought it would be nice to go lie down with him in some shady spot. He said, 'Poor Fenton.
He's having a hard enough time getting the campaign off the ground, and then when he comes here he runs into this awful mess. It's been a rough year for him, believe me.'
He set down the paint cans and brushes and we walked toward the back of the house past a bed of nasturtiums that looked like cool, soft fire. I said, 'There's been no mass of recruits signing on for the gay national strike?'
A weary laugh. 'No, no masses. If the GNS is going to work there'll have to be millions, of course. But so far the people who've pledged to come out of the closet and join the strike can only be numbered in the hundreds. Or maybe tens,' he added, shaking his head dolefully. 'We've only been to nine cities so far, and we've got almost another year-ten and a half months-to get people committed. But so far it's been pretty discouraging. A joke, really. I mean, it's partly because it's summer, don't you think? People are more interested now in cultivating their tans than they are in social justice. Maybe in the fall…' He turned to me with a tentative smile. 'So, how do you think we'll do at the center in Albany tonight?'
'Hard to say,' I lied, having a good idea of what was going to happen. Which was too bad, because McWhirter's notion of a national coming-out day as the first event of a week-long gay national strike seemed to me a wonderful piece of whimsy-which, if it ever somehow actually happened, could make a real difference in the way American homosexuals were thought of and treated.
McWhirter, I'd read in the gay papers, envisioned gay air traffic controllers, executives, busboys, priests, construction workers, doctors, data analysts, White House staffers, Congressmen, newsboys, waitresses, housewives, firemen, FBI agents-the whole lot of us suddenly declaring ourselves and walking off our jobs and letting the straight majority try to keep the country running on their own for a week. It was a bold, wacky, irresistible idea.
But a lot of people were resisting the GNS anyway. The big national gay organizations estimated
— correctly, I guessed-that too few people would participate and the thing would end up an embarrassment to the movement. This was also a self-fulfilling prophecy: McWhirter was receiving no financial support from the big outfits. His waspish personality was said to be putting off a number of would-be supporters too. Another good idea done in by its originator's poor social skills.
The gay press was covering McWhirter's campaign sporadically and offering wistful and qualifiedly encouraging editorials. Notice by the straight press had been even more fitful, and the tone of the few stories printed or broadcast had ranged from the tittering to the maliciously bug-eyed.
Albany would not, I thought, be the place where the GNS campaign took off. Of the sixteen people likely to show up at the Gay Community Center that night to hear McWhirter's plea for support, three would tiptoe upstairs midway in the presentation and play Monopoly. Of the six who would sign on at the end of McWhirter's description of how we would shut the country 12 down for a week, three would be full-time recipients of public assistance. The outlook in Albany was not promising.
'Well,' Greco said, putting the best face on it, 'even if we don't do terribly well at the center tonight, we'll be leafleting the bars afterwards. I remember when I lived here that on Friday nights the bars are full of state workers. Imagine what it would be like if all the gay people in the South Mall walked out for a week. What a glorious mess that would be!'
'Right. The state bureaucracy would become sluggish and disorganized.'
He stopped by the back door of the house and looked at me uncertainly, examined my face, then suddenly shook with bright laughter. 'Well,' he said, 'you know what I mean.' He laughed again, and his hand came up and gently brushed my cheek, a gesture as natural and uncomplicated for Greco as a happy child's reaching out spontaneously to touch a sibling. Greco, waiflike and vulnerable, was not a type I usually went for. But on the other hand… Maybe it was the heat.
Inside the big pine-paneled kitchen of the farmhouse, Dot Fisher was slumped against a doorjamb and speaking wearily into a wall phone. One hand pressed the receiver hard against her ear under a short, damp thicket of frizzy gray-black hair, and the other arm rested on the little crockpot of a belly that protruded from her otherwise wiry frame. Wet half-moons stained the sides of the white cotton sleeveless shift she wore, and her long, sun- reddened face, deeply etched with age and the things she knew, was screwed up now in a grimace of barely controlled frustration, and gleamed with sweat. She forced a distracted smile in our direction and waggled a finger urgently at the refrigerator.
